Blog 6

Today I finished taking the photos for my final project, edited them or most of them and thought about how I'm going to present them in a 3D sculpture. 

Fairly early on I had a chat with my teacher at where I was at with my sketchbook and my project. We agreed that I need to do more on my research report and print it out into my book. After he saw my photos he suggested that my 3D sculpture could be minimilistic like the brand Apple. I thought this was a good idea because my photos are already fairy simple and have white backgrounds. I thought I could just present my photos on white cubes of difference size and possibly stuck to one another at interesting angles and levels.

After break I  went out to take some photos. I did this around the school and with sam because the photos were going to be of me so I needed someone to take the photos. I had brought in a football and I also used Harry's juggling balls and Sam's basketball. The reason why I needed all these different types of balls was because was going to get a photo of my body to controlling them because the theme of the project is control. 

I already had some photos of someone playing basketball but the the person was not me and this week I decided that it would be better if all the were of photos of me so that it looked more like I hadn't just used random photos. I also wore the same clothes as last week so that the colour theme carried on in the photos as well.  

Shooting the photos wasn't to hard but there were still some challenges we had to overcome. One off these was not getting the shadow in the background. We overcame this by moving further  away from the wall and by changing the angle we took the photos from. Another problem was that I couldn't juggle. We other came this though by throwing the three balls up in the air and mimicking the hand position of someone who could actually juggle and then taking photos until it looked convincing.

When I got back into the classroom I edited the photos I had just took in the same ways as last week cropping and changing the brightness contrast and exposure. These were the results or three of them. 

I am pleased with these photos. As you can see I have made the
backgrounds very bright but not completely white. The one
on the left of the basket ball is a bit brighter than the others.
 I think next week I will slightly darken it so it matches.

After lunch I took photos of the faces of about 8 or 9 people for my second idea which was to stitch (on photoshop) together different parts of different peoples faces to make one face made up of lots of different peoples faces. I had a go at this but because i'm not very good at photoshop it didn't look very finalised. 

Blog 5

Today I started off by carrying on from last week by brainstorming and thinking about my ideas
from last week and working out how best to do them. I thought of a new idea because my other ideas weren't really about control. My idea was to take photos of people doing things that show them controlling their bodies.

My ideas for this were someone...

• Doing a handstand
• Doing a somersault
• juggling 
• doing parkour or jumping 
• balancing 
• playing the drums
• dancing 
• playing football or basketball

I wasn't sure how to present these images in a 3d sculpture but I was told to leave that till next week and get on with taking the photos this week.

I wasn't very pleased with this photo

So I went out with my camera. I had to wait for Harry because some of the photos were going to be of me and I couldn't take photos of myself. First I asked Harry to take some photos of me doing a front flip because  

it showed me controlling my body. I wasn't very pleased with the outcome of these photos though. Most of them looked funny and it wasn't clear what the photo was of. They were also quite blurry and on some, the exposure was wrong. Also because I couldn't take the photos myself, they weren't very artistically taken.

I then went found place where you lock up your bicycle. I thought I could ask someone to take a picture of me jumping of it, in front of the white wall. This represents control because you have to balance on the metal and then control your movement so you land safely.

I was very pleased with the result after I had edited them. My favourite is probably the one on the right. I like it because it shows a lot of movement and control. I also like how my hood is up so I like more menacing.  I think it is a good picture because I am roughly on the third line both horizontally and vertically. To edit this photo first I upped the brightness to make the background more white. I then changed the contrast to make the colours more vibrant. I then cropped it a bit to remove unnecessary objects and make me on the third lines. Finally I made the whole background black and white apart from me in the photo. I think the effect of this is quite subtle because the background was greyish colours anyway but I think it does draw attention to the person in the photo an make he look like he is jumping from the ground instead of the metal bicycle stand. This makes
the photo look  a bit unreal and a bit like a computer game. I don't think this is bad though since a lot of fine art photography is heavily edited and does' quite make sense.

This is another photo similar to the one above. I don't like it as much because the background and action is less interesting. Editing this photo was similar to the first one apart from I use the brush tool to get rid of the shadow behind me and made the brightness so high it look like there is no wall behind me.  I like how the photo is quite long and thin. It makes it different and unique.

The Steps I went through to edit this photo

1) Original image                                  2) Changing brightness and contrast

3) Cropping                                                                 4) Adding effects such as black and white.

This one (left) is another photo I edited. It is the shadow against a white wall, of someone holding two drumsticks. It represents contorl because you need to conrol your hands well to play the drums well. I like it because having it a shadow is more interesting than just taking a photo of someone plainly. To edit it a changed the curves and made it brighter and more contrasting  

 This is another image I edited.



Blog 4

Today I finished off editing the photos I took last week.  The first photo I edited was a close up of a chain. I changed the constant bar to get the green and red effect. I think this makes the picture look interesting but maybe a bit to much like I was messing around with the colours (which I was).
I think black and white may of suited the chain and control theme rather than red and green.

On another photo I made the curves go steeply up and then steeply down several times. This made the colours on the photo go crazy. The sky looked like a tie die t-shirt. This looked very wacky but wasn't  helping me get across the message I wanted in the photo so I changed it back and instead just made it a bit more contrasting.

See the effect of changing the contrast.

I added changed the colours on this photo so its like a sepia effect.

After lunch we brainstormed some ideas for our final project. I came up with lots of single ideas quite easily but then found it hard to put them together into three finalised ideas. In the end I only came up with two, some thing to do with sticking different photos of different parts of the human body together so a face would be made up of different people with different hair eyes and coloured skin.  I also thought you could do the same in the background so one half of a tree is different to the second half. 

My second idea was to do a series of close up back and white photos of objects such as dice, chess pieces, knifes skulls bones and chains. I thought you could hang them up on a mobile or wheel. Both these ideas don't particularly link to control so I may have to change them so they do.