Final Portfolio

My portfolio is focused on tropical and beautiful settings and composed in to postcard sized final products to give the feel of getting a postcard from someone on a vacation or seeing a pamphlet for a tropical tourist area.

Coming from the suburbs of Pennsylvania where all I would see were trees around me and the city life of New York, seeing a palm tree or a clear blue ocean in a tropical setting was something very exciting for me. I wanted to focus on the things that drew me to these settings the way a postcard or a pamphlet of an area may draw someone to that specific place. The subjects in the photographs themselves are mainly the nature of a tropical area or of another beautiful area.

My series has a lot to do with taking trips to different places and postcards go very much with traveling to these kinds of areas. Family members on vacations send postcards to friends and other family members to send them a “hello” and “wish you were here” message. My series is supposed to create the feeling from the viewer that they wish they were in that setting or is supposed to create a memory of when they went on a vacation to a place like the photographed areas, and picked up a postcard for someone.

Besides photographs being the only good thing to take home for a memory of your favorite place, a postcard is also a good thing to have around to have as a keepsake of that trip. Many can be uses for a scrapbook or a travel journal.

During this year, I have received many postcards from family that display photographs of home. Although home for me may not be tropical, it gives me the feeling of longing for that place and the feeling of wanting to be there at the moment when I look at the postcard. That is what I hope my photographs will be able to do.

Critique #4

This week I decided to focus solely on the things that I believe are tropical and things that give off a tropical feeling. I wanted to take photographs of things that people see every day around this area since the only place I could mostly get photos from were the Rollins Campus. I tried to show things that make me think of tropical places. When I think of tropical areas, Florida definitely comes to mind. Another thing I think of when tropical comes to mind are palm trees. Florida has many palm trees and that was one of the reasons that I wanted to be down in Florida. I wanted to be here for the weather and the palm trees. People up who are from up North, like myself, don’t get to see palm trees on a daily basis because of the fluctuating weather. I also didn’t get to see palm trees because I lived in the suburbs around areas where woods were the majority of land space.

Google Reader Response #10

This week when looking at the photographs I found an entire series that I liked a lot. They are probably my favorite of all the photographs I have chosen to look at and discuss on this blog throughout this semester. The series is made up of 4 photographs with the same title besides the number that is in it, and taken by Ayano Hisa. At first I only saw “in Tohoku 4,” so I only thought there was one photograph. They are all photographs that were taken in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami tore their world apart. The photographs were taken in schools that had been destroyed and were left abandoned because of lack of ability to fix it up. I really enjoy photographs where you can see distraction. I understand the underlying sadness in most broken town or torn down places, but there is also something beautiful about the distraction.

 

Chapter 7 Reading Response

Chapter 7 discusses the “truth” aspect of photography. It discusses the fear from people who were unsure about the digital process behind creating and producing photography. It had been film up to a point and then when digital photography and talk about memory cards and computer programs to fix up photographs came in to the picture, people started to fear about the authenticity of the photographs that were being created with all this new technology. I thought it was very interesting how on page 321 when Liz Wells discusses what a critic stated. ‘Digital technology does not subvert “normal” photography because “normal” photography never existed’ (Manovich 2003: 254). I think this would be a really interesting thing to discuss in class with everyone. I would like to hear everyones feelings on this.

Something else that I thought was really interesting was the topic of 3D alteration. The story about the Landrover being manipulated was very fascinating. I enjoyed reading about the manipulation of everything in the photograph because the car hadn’t been created yet. The most fascinating part to the whole thing was how they created the light hitting the car with the disco ball thing. I thought that was very innovative even though it was all very fake. It is so surprising to think that in our class for the most part we are just manipulating color palettes and maybe a little cloning here and there. None of us have really manipulated the entire thing to be completely different. We haven’t completely created a photograph out of photoshop and other elements. It’s just very interesting to me.

Google Reader Response #9

This week I decided to go back to a blog that I had chosen from before. I went back to look at the Flak Photo blog and found a photograph that was so beautiful and interesting to me. It is called Untitled by Katherine Wolkoff. It is a photograph of a dirt road in sunset and there is a smoke of dust flying up from it. I think this is such a cool photograph. At first it looked like a regular road and some place where the road was so hot that steam was coming off of it. I have seen roads before that are like that. When I realized that it was a dirt road, I found it even more fascinating. I have never really been on many dirt roads before and really want to take a trip sometime off of the map where the only roads to drive on are dirt. The only time that I have been on dirt roads were when I was living in Australia. My parents and I took a trip across Australia which was absolutely amazing. I want to do it again sometime. This photograph is also beautiful because of the light. There is a slight tint from the sun and then the road is dark.

 

http://flakphoto.com/