2/27/2017 0 Comments Week 6This week was exciting and stressful. We learned the chemistry behind the photo development process, and began processing photos. There were lots of problems with the photos being over exposed, or the emulsion being streaky. As a solution, we decided to try using different lights to expose the photos and changing the material we were printing on. We ended up using a light that needed to be on longer in order to expose correctly (so we had a larger margin of error) and we decided to print on glass instead of paper. I'm excited to print my photo on the glass, because I think it will end up being very cool There are four parts to the development of our photo emulsions. There's the developer, the stop back, the fixer, and the wash. This is what they do: Developer - Adds an electron back to feed silver ions, making it turn black Stop Bath - Stops the developer by taking away any left over electrons Fixer - Dissolves remaining Silver Chloride salts Wash - Washes away residual chemicals I understand the process at a base level, but I still have two questions about the process. My first is, How does the fixer "fix" the emulsion if it's already gone through the stop bath? And my second is, how does the stop bath stop he reaction without reversing it? Below I have linked my full draft of the writing pieces for my photo. I wrote through through five lenses: Emotional, Personal, Compositional, Subject Pov, and "The Human Struggle." For the next phase of the project, we're focusing on landscapes. When asked where I'd possibly like to go, I came up with a small/easy idea and a big/difficult idea. The small idea is to hike Cowell's Mountain, and to take pictures there. The big idea is to take a weekend trip to the Grand Canyon, and to maybe camp there as well.
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2/16/2017 0 Comments Week 5This week I took my final photo for the first phase of the project. The whole team went to balboa park, and took photos. We also visited The Museum of Photograpgic Arts while we were there. We made more photo paper with our emulsions, and we finished our Dorothea Lange essays and put them in the templates. This is my Dorothea Lange 1000 word piece. I wrote my essays about a little girl from New Mexico. I wrote about the photo through 5 lenses. Now that The Dorothea Lange piece is finished, we're doing it again, but this time with our own photos. Abouve is my edited photo and the negative, and below my first writing piece is linked.
2/9/2017 0 Comments WEEK 4This week wasn't too stressful. We learned some pretty cool things from Andrew about how to edit black and white photos in photoshop. In chemistry we coated our papers with our emulsions, and practiced setting up our apparatuses more. This week I also started the class instagram with a couple of my peers and helped organize the account details. In humanities, we had to write essays about a photo taken by Dorothea Lange. I wrote mine through 5 lenses: emotional, composition, light, subject pov, and artistic. emotionalThis photo can convey so many different emotions depending on how a person looks at it, and how much they know about it. Without any analysis, this photo conveys sadness to me at first. She's alone, and she appears to be slightly frowning. Her stance is sort of closed off, which I suppose could represent sadness or the feeling of being unsettled. Although, once I learned more about this girl, the overall tone changed for me. That caption says “Resettled child of Bosque Farms, New Mexico. She herds cows for neighboring families for five cents per day.” With just that information, I get a more hopeful feeling. This girl works to earn money. I can tell she doesn't have much, and the fact that she works makes me thinks she wants to change that. I think she's hopeful because she’s working to make things at least a little bit better. Things will still be rough, but maybe her earning means she’ll finally be able to afford soap. To me, this young girl represents hope, because she's working her way through a hard time and that's the best we can do when the going gets tough. Push through. coMposItionI don't know what it is, but something about this photo’s composition is very compelling to me. The little girl is positioned directly in the center, which makes it obvious she’s the subject of the photo. Her shadow is on the lower third line, and it pulls my focus away from the girl a bit. The girl and her shadow are really the only two things in the photo, and I think that's the best thing that the photographer could have decided to do. The girl is sort of plain on the surface, so if there had been anything else in the background, it would have distracted from the subject. I think Dorothea definitely planned this. She wanted the girl and her emotion to really stand out. I also think the lack of other things in the photo forces you to look deeper into the little girl. If there was other stuff in the photo, I would have never seen the small important details in the photo. I would have never felt the emotions I felt. Without the planning of composition, this photo would only be okay. With it, this photo is great. lightThe lighting in this photograph seems pretty ordinary until you look more into it. It's definitely natural sunlight, as she's outside in a field. The lighting is high key, because the sky is light. This gives the photo a softer feeling, and also helps the girl’s body contrast. The girl’s face is lit dramatically. It looks like Rembrandt lighting to me, because of the small amount of light on her right cheek and eye. The drama of the lighting affects the tone of the photo, making it more sad-looking. The shadows on and around her arm and wrist make her thinness stand out to me. The highlights and shadows contrast well, so it makes her bones look very prominent. Her dress looks old and worn, and I thinks the texture of the wrinkles and ruffles contribute to that. The light hits all of the raised spots of the ruffles, and causes shadows in the indented spots. The creases look very deep and dark, which causes it to seem like her dress has been worn often. If you're not looking into it very much, the lighting seems very average. The lighting contributes very much to the way her face and body look, but in a very subtle way. I think this subtlety is what makes this photo fantastic. subject p.o.vIt's another New Mexico day. The sun beats down on me as I herd the neighbors cows. I don't like cows; they stink. “We need it,” I remind myself, “we need this money.” I'm just a kid. I could be going to school, playing, doing what a child does. I could be, but we are poor. I can't afford to do what a normal girl my age does. We can't afford to be “normal.” Instead we work. I do what I can. It isn't easy, but I finally convinced the neighbors to let me herd for them. I am grateful for this opportunity. I am grateful for the 5 cents I get every day. It gets us food for at least one more night. I don’t know much, school is a luxury to me, but I know that we need food if we want to survive. 5 cents sometimes is the difference between survival and hunger. Sometimes it's the difference between life and death. 5 cents is what is keeping me alive. The 5 cents I get for every day I work is my life, and without it I am as good as dead. “Hey, Girl! Get back to work, I’m not paying you for nothing,” The neighbor woman yells. I snap out of it. “Yes ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” I go back to work. I need my 5 cents. ArtisticI think the artist was trying to capture two things: emotion, and the emptiness of the setting. This girl does not look very happy to me. She looks tired. To me she somehow looks simultaneously very young and very old. I think she looks young due to how small she is. She looks very weak and skinny. It makes me wonder how much food she's been able to eat. Her clothing looks made for a young girl. It's very light and innocent, as a child should be. From far away, she looks like what she is - a young girl. It's when you look closer, that you see the other side of the story. She looks like an old woman who has seen many days of work. She has creases on her forehead and by her eyes. Up close, her face looks like it could belong to a 35 year old woman. This is a sign that things are rough. I also looked at what's around her. It's practically nothing. It looks lonely. I'm sure there's some sort of housing not pictured, but in this photo, this girl is alone. Perhaps the monochromatic look of the background is what's making me say this, but it looks extremely bland. It looks like there's nothing to distract this girl from the difficult life she's living, and for that, I am sorry. Another thing we had to do in humanities was plan a trip to get a final photo for us to develop. My friends and I would like to try out night photography in downtown, and also take some photos of public transit. We want to capture 2 things: the struggle of people who have to take public transit to work and the struggle of people who have to work late to make a living. As I mentioned before, we did a workshop this week on how to make photos black and white in photoshop. I edited a picture of Maddie that was originally in color. The first photo is the original and the second is the one I edited. To get it to look like this I adjusted the red, yellow, and, and blue and I fixed up the levels on the histogram. I also bumped up the contrast a bit and lowered the brightness.
2/1/2017 0 Comments Week 3This week was very exciting. This week we got to take photos with a professional setup, which is something I've always wanted to do. We started our 150-250 word writing pieces on depression era photographs taken by Dorothea Lange. I've done two so far, but I still need 3 more. The two i've done will be linked below. We also transformed Andrew's room into a dark room this week. We covered the door widow with tinfoil and created safelights by covering lightbulbs with brown paper bags. We also cleaned up a bit to make it easier to function in the dark. We read the first chapter of Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, and so far I really like it. For Humanities we were 2 questions about the first chapter of Of Mice and Men: 1.) Tell us about George and Lennie George is small, with tired eyes and sharp features. He's responsible and hard working. He takes care of Lennie, and expresses that he's tired of it. He says things all about how his life could be easier without Lennie He would be able to do whatever he wants with hid money, and perhaps find a girl and settle down. However, when Lennie offers to leave, he takes it all back. He says he was kidding, and I think that shows that George really cares about Lennie, even if he doesn't show it very well. Lennie is a "man of tremendous size" and he's very forgetful. He has good intentions, but the outcome isn't always great. He likes to pet mice, because they're soft, however he forgets is strength and ends up killing them by petting too hard. George takes care of him, and helps him remember the things he forgets. To me it seems he's very fond of George, and appreciates that he takes care of him. When George complains about him, he offers to leave, and thats kind of heart-breaking. To me that conveys that he just wants to make George happy even if that means leaving him. 2.) What is Steinbeck saying about society? I think he's taking about empathy. Humans are naturally empathetic. We'll do things for others even if they're not in our best interest. Lennie is pretty problematic. He's messy and forgetful and he's lost lots of work for him and George. Even after all of that, George takes care of him. He gets frustrated sometimes it seems, but he stays with him. He reminds him of what he forgets, and tries to keep him out of trouble, and I think that comes from empty. As I mentioned earlier, we turned Andrew's room into a dark room. We were all given roles to help make the dark room set up process easier. I'm on the maintenance team. That means I get to help build things like our lighting setup, and I am in charge of making sure everything is in good shape. It something needs fixing up, I'm also in charge of that. Setting up the dark room was pretty simple. The main things we did was clean up a bit, rearrange some tables, and put up our safe lights.
The thing that allows us to do make our emulsions are our apparatuses. The apparatuses are made up of a few things: a hot plate, a pot of water, a stand, two beakers, some clamps, and a thermometer. The beakers are put in clamps, that are connected to the stand. The clamps are suspending the beakers in hot water, heated by the hot plate. The thermometer goes in the water to make sure our emulsions are the correct temperature. Having the apparatuses allows us to be more precise and safe. Without them, it would be difficult to heat the emulsions to the correct temperature, and it would make it harder to function. |
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June 2017
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