Surreal Photo Assignment

My idea for the surreal photo assignment is based on toys.  This idea came to me during a class discussion about the Feed the Baby art project.  When my boys were smaller they loved playing with Hot Wheels and action figures.  I am going to try to shoot toys and kids so that real cars become toys and the kids are the same size as the action figures.  A child’s fantasy is to be an action figure and have all the equipment that comes with the GI Joes or the Ghostbusters, isn’t it?

Here is my final Surreal Photo:

Panorama

I took 10 pictures at the Del Amo Mall with the intention of making a panorama.  However, the pictures were not taken from a single vantage point.  I moved down one side of the upper balcony while shooting the opposite side.  In other words, I moved parallel to the subject matter.  I thought it would make an interesting picture (and it did), but technically it was a nightmare to get the photos to blend together. 

After spending way too much time working on this, I took photos of Catalina Island from a friend’s deck in San Pedro.  I thought that more pictures are better than fewer pictures when making a panorama, so I used 7 photos for the Catalina panorama.  It seems that with all the horizontal lines this should have been a snap for Photoshop and it should look better technically than the mall photo.  The photo merge only knit three of the photos together and I did the rest by placing and transforming them.  Not so easy.  This panorama came out better than the mall but it looks sort of like one of those “wish you were here” postcards.

Four Photos, Print Three, One Black & White

These are the four photos before editing:

The picture of the dog was an attempt to have objects at different distances to show depth.  I was standing at an angle to the corner of the room, trying to make the room look bigger than it is.  This is the photo that I converted to black and white because it reminded me somewhat of the “artist a day” photos that I talked about below.  I edited this photo by smoothing out the “cottage cheese” ceiling in the room as well as a few other things.  I wish I could change the ceiling in my house so easily.

The car photo interested me because of the squiggle of light coming off of the hubcaps.  I blurred out the fence so it would not interfere with the car and the motion.

 The koi fish picture was an experiment to see what would happen if I focused on a slow moving object that was mostly in the dark.  I did not edit this picture at all.  After it was printed I wished I had taken out the white spot to the left of the fish. 

The picture of the pine tree was taken on a recent hike on Mt. Baldy.  I was very close to the tree and there was a mountain in the background.  I wanted to see what would be in focus.  I played with the color on this picture, making the greens more vibrant and the sky darker blue.  I liked this picture better than the car photo; however, upon seeing the four printed pictures as a group, this one didn’t fit as well.

Self Portrait Poster

My self portrait poster is a statement about the environment, inside the home and outside.  I started with a picture of a window from the internet. 

 I scanned seed packets that I had in my gardening supplies and tiled them together to make the wallpaper. 

I took a picture of myself in my backyard using the time delay feature on my camera.

 and put these elements together.    

ARTISTADAY Selection –Abelardo Morell

I was looking through the photographs on ARTISTADAY for work that looked like it came from a camera rather than Adobe’s Photoshop.  These pictures from Abelardo Morell were made with a camera obscura.  This is a technique that goes back centuries and is often associated with Renaissance artists.  (Vermeer is said to have used it.)   While you can find lists of all the known camera obscura in the world on the internet, Morell can turn an ordinary room into camera obscura very easily.  Here are two examples of his photography and included below is the background information from the ARTISTADAY website. 

From http://www.artistaday.com/?p=157

Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell’s photographs remind us that photography is more about how we see than the tools we use to create it. As we become ensconced with computer technology, more and more artists are returning to the past, working with processes and instruments more than one hundred years old. Morell is one of those artists who burst onto the scene with a series of images made with a camera obscura — a lensless camera most often associated with Renaissance artists.
Morell takes an ordinary room – his living room, his son’s bedroom, a hotel room — and transforms it into a camera by placing black plastic over all of the windows, leaving a 3/8″ hole through which the light passes. He then sets up his view camera in the room, points it at the opposite wall, opens the lens and lets the image appear on the film over the next eight hours. The result of his endeavor is a magical world which fuses outdoor elements with domestic scenes, allowing the viewer to see the existing reality outside the window. Morell has transformed many rooms into cameras, recording the Empire State Building inside a bedroom, Times Square onto the sterile walls of a Marriott hotel room, and a view of Brookline onto the walls and ceiling of his son’s bedroom, as trees and buildings interact with toy dinosaurs. These are extraordinary images alter our perception of reality and our placement in it.
source: EdelmanGallery.com