Final Critique Write-ups

Mystical

For my mystical project I created a glowing cloud, I'm a huge fan of practical effects in movies and

photographs, not necessarily because they look better so much as I wonder how the artist

accomplished a result without digital assistance. I looked into trying several different ideas that

would have created an unusual finished project that would make people wonder how I created it. The

one I finally went with was a glowing cloud. I created it by taking a folding chinese lantern and hot

gluing clumps of polyester fiber all around it. I then took a string of LED christmas lights and

removed the colored bulbs so it was just a strand of yellowish lights and then wrapped it around the

cloud hiding the wires as best I could. I took it into the garage and hung it by a string from the

ceiling, it looked good but there was no way to tell it's scale and it was lighting up a few things

behind it. So I dragged my sister into it so you could really see how large it was and hung a dark

colored blanket behind it. I then took a few pictures while my sister examined it and received the

final image. It's easy to create mystical things with digital imagery, but there is a special magic for

me of getting a sense of wonder from purely physical components.

(I must admit though, I used a little smudging to hide a wire)



Portrait

The family went on a shopping trip and a walk down town and I brought the camera along just in

case any good social commentary ideas popped into my head while down there. As we walked along

my sister pointed out how pretty these hanging lights were, and I noticed it created much better

lighting than expected for it being a sunny day out and asked my sister and her friend to stand in

various areas to see what looked good. This final angle was the best one I could find, it's unfortunate

that the street is still in the bottom left of the photo but I agree with my sister that the hanging lights

and darker area looked very good and even when I tried taking portrait shots in one or two other areas

 they didn't seem to turn out quite as nicely as this one did.




Social Commentary

So as of course you have read already I had been carrying my camera around with me looking for

good ideas, and like most of the class was struggling. I actually showed up Friday morning at Best

Buy and stood in the parking lot taking pictures of the lineup of people waiting to rush into the store,

but when they door opened everybody just leisurely walked in leaving me without any interesting

subject matter. Grumbling about it on the drive home I remembered that at Yellowstone I had taken a

picture of one of the lambs appearing to stare at the roadway before crossing it and realized there was

 a pretty decent conversation to be had about our continued impact on the natural wildlife. When we

were standing on the road photographing the lead Ewe walked across the road without hesitation, but

the lambs stood behind and watched it for a solid minute before nervously attempting to cross. The

photo I snagged appears to be one of the lambs examining the yellow line down the middle of the

street during a pause in its walk. (although it was really scratching its ear).



Night

The first night photo was one I think everybody wanted to try at least once, a long exposure of a

vehicle flying past. I was counting on taking a good picture of the supermoon on Sunday, but every

time I was able to check for it the weather was too overcast to get an interesting photo. So Instead I

walked down to Rimrock and took many long exposures of cars flying past or of my wiggling

around the camera looking at stoplights. I don't own a proper tripod so I was leaning against a tree to

hold the camera as steady as possible and that's how I got this simple example of the technique.


My second photo I think is interesting but didn't turn out quite as well as I was hoping, it's a bird

fountain on my street with a nice little statue holding a pot in the middle. I poured hot water over the

snowy ice to try and make it look clean and glisten but it refused to work with the camera even after

 adding almost a dozen small electric candles. I was battling with a nearby street light that was

polluting the darkness and the window of the house in the background. I only had one sister to hold

up a blanket for me and I chose to block out the street lamp. I wish I had come up with a way to light

 up the statue's face or make the shadows a little stronger but I'm not too disappointed with the result.