Critique

After the critique on Thursday, I came away with a better understanding of a good self portrait, and what to change about mine. There was some interesting shadows on my face in my first self portrait, which show the shape of the camera. Without doing too much, it might be cool to emphasize the shadow in photoshop. Also, the self portrait with my legs walking away is a cool photo, in my opinion, but from what Priscilla said it doesn't seem to show much about who I am or give very much emotion. We talked a lot about portraying emotion through our self portraits, and I think that is something I need to work on. I was nervous about that before because I didn't want them to seem "Myspace-like". But I think now I have a better understanding of how to go about that. Along with emotion, symbolism is also something I should consider. For instance, water has a lot of symbolism and there is a lot that one can do with water to make a portrait interesting. The way one interacts with the surroundings also adds for an interesting narrative. This weekend I took more pictures and tried to play with the idea of interacting with the space I was in.

I also never even thought of putting something where I would be standing in the picture to get the focus and composition in the right place, and then jump in at the last second. I tried that this weekend and it made things much easier! :)

After watching that documentary about Annie Leibovitz, it changed my thinking of what photographs can do. I always thought about photography as a way to capture a moment in time, but the way that Annie took pictures made the moments special without needing any explanation or outside information. For instance the pictures she took during the 60's when she began working for rolling stone of the hippies, showed how much passion and emotion these individuals had, all through one photograph. The pictures speak for themselves. The same as in the Lennon and Yoko Ono picture. It has so much love and intimacy in their embrace. It is also so special that this was taken only hours before John Lennon died.

It is just so amazing how much Annie can capture in her pictures. The emotion and energy is incredible. She just has such a talent and an eye for getting the essence of her subjects.

#1

This picture was taken by Matt Handelman, a UD student who I went on a study abroad trip with to Australia.  This picture is of Philip Island, not far from Melbourne.  We were here in the evening, around sunset. What I love about this picture is the dark effect that he used.  I have similar pictures, but they don't exaggerate the lights and darks as much as Matt's.  I really want to learn how to edit the color and lighting to change the effects of a landscape (or portrait, picture of friends, etc).  I love this picture :)