Briefly: A Perspective Study

After the crushing length of the last post, I wanted to break up the rhythm of this blog a bit and do something shorter. Our insanely-bearded professor, Alec Longstreth, recently gave us the best perspective lecture I have ever seen. He super-imposed perspective lines over normal photos, and by the end it was so obvious that the exercise had been become mundane! For homework, we had to take one of our own photos that clearly shows 1, 2, or 3-point perspective, light-box/trace the perspective lines, and then do an illustration off of it. So here’s the photo I used:

It’s a picture I shot in Berlin, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I didn’t write about it at the time, but it was an intensely powerful place to be. As you walk into it and the stone rectangles surround you, it really is disconcerting. Anyway, here it is with some perspective lines on top of it:

The yellow line is the “horizon line;” which is really obvious in this photo because the rectangles become flat and straight on. The other colors are the three planes of perspective. You can see on the right that the red line tapers in a little, and isn’t just straight up and down like it would be in 2-point. So I “light-boxed” (with a piece of plexi-glass on my lap and a desk lamp on the ground pointing up) these perspective lines onto a piece of bristol and drew this:

Please resist the urge but enlarge if you must, it looks much better smaller. I might get around to coloring it at some point — I kinda like it.

Disposable Europe

We take pictures to supplement our visual memories. Aside from sheer artistic and aesthetic merit, no one needs convincing that pictures we take remind us of people, places, and things. I’ve heard that when we take pictures, it limits and focuses our memories, but it’s easy to give that up for the joy of fondly remembering something from a snapshot. Anyone who has ever had a camera stolen knows what a terrible feeling that can be. More after the jump.

Help Me Pick My Final Critique Photos

So I’ve picked 32 pictures for final critique. It is a series on cooking and all that goes into it. However, I can only use thirteen. Check them out here and leave comments on the ones you think I should include (or here if you aren’t a flickr member). Obviously I’m not going to use multiple pictures of sausage, so keep that in mind. I made them smaller so they would upload easily, but they are in fact larger in original form.

Ansel Adams’ “Born Free and Equal”

Ansel Adams is probably the most famous American photographer. He died three years before I was born, in 1984, and is responsible for the much of the American West’s iconic imagery. There is currently an exhibit of his work and another of Annie Leibovitz at the Corcoran in downtown DC. It’s worth the ten dollars. Anyway, I was writing a paper about a particular work in the exhibit that caught my eye.

Adams took the picture while visiting Mazanar, one of the Japanese internment camps during WWII. Everyone’s heard of these, but it’s often a footnote in US history. Truly and sincerely, by order executive order of FDR, the War Relocation Authority forcefully imprisoned over a hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans (many of whom were born in the United States) between 1942 and 1944. Adams’ photographs at the camps resulted in a show at NY’s MoMA and in a book called “Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans.” Believe it or not, this book has been scanned in its entirety and hosted for all to see in the Library of Congress’ free Digital Collection.

Anyone could have taken pictures of this important place and time, but it was important that it was Adams for several reasons. His approach was stylistic, and highly educated visually, but he understood the value of letting the pictures tell the stories and trying to be objective as possible. Also, he was drawn to the way that the people reacted to the harsh atmosphere of the Sierra Nevada range. This interaction between individual and place is essential to the emotional energy of his photography. He’s not a bad writer either.

Photography Critique #2

So this photo crit was digital and everything was shot with a Nikon D80, which is a great camera. There were no requirements; it just had to be seven pictures. Here they are.

First Photography Critique

So these aren’t the best scans, but they aren’t terrible. I didn’t change anything from my prints. You can see larger versions here. It’s really worth checking out the link because a little gets cut off each frame in this format. The critique was really long and drawn out, but my portion went well as I’m a little used to crits. from graphic design. I was surprised at how much I’m drawn to strong vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. I also focused on a lot of basic shapes like squares and circles. Let me know what you think.

This one is showing motion.

This one is stopping motion.

This is a shallow depth of field shot.

This is a deep depth of field shot.

This is a pan shot.

This is an egg shot.