If I Just Say Hello

Uttar Pradesh, India: In India I visited a village where whole families were enslaved in the silk industry. This is a family portrait. The father (hands in black) and his sons (hands in red and blue) are held captive in a “silk dyeing house.” The dye they work with is toxic. It’s common for entire families to be enslaved for generations. My translator told me their story. “We have no freedom,” they said. “But we hope, some day, we will be able to leave this house and make dyes in a place where we actually get paid for it.”

So this year for spring break I went to Disneyland twice! And of course I brought my camera along! My family got pretty irritated because I kept stopping randomly…but it was worth it! I was actually really looking forward to this trip because I hadn’t had my camera last year when I went to Disneyland and although I love the iPhone camera, it does not do Disneyland justice. I needed a more serious camera for my trip and this time I had it! I can’t wait to edit all of my photos because last year I got to play around with them a lot and did some pretty cool stuff so we’ll see what I come up with this year!

*None of these photos are edited…yet! ;)

This post is about my final four photos that I got from the large format camera. I had a lot of fun with the camera because I could choose where to focus the image and it was a lot of fun to play around with. I also really enjoyed my first attempt at portraiture! I had always been wary of it but it’s actually a lot of fun.

Claudia with her angel wings.

Ilana and her fish. Color was a good option for this picture because without it, the fish would have completely faded from the image.

First sheet of film! I decided I’d try out the camera at first on objects so that I wasn’t overwhelming myself with two new projects at once.

Taylor with her umbrella. What a model!

Some polaroids from last week. I also took film of these pictures, a little modified. As you can tell I was doing portraiture, using props. It was fun to compose an image with a random person and a random object. I was hoping my models would choose their props and body positioning but for the most part I was the one doing this. I don’t mind, it’s fun to compose a shot. However, I really want to get them more involved in the photo. I don’t want to photograph faces, I want to photograph personalities.

So here’s mah first two pictures from this rotation:

this camera’s so much fun! I’m going to tilt and shift the living daylight out of it!!!!!!! (and not forget to focus it…)

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on making an origami firework out of my photos. It was very labor-intensive because I made the 24-page model. It was one of the more complicated origami projects that I’ve done, but it came out really cool and is fun to play with. You can change its shape and it folds different ways, so it’s very entertaining!

I discovered that using brightly colored pictures is really where it’s at with these because you don’t get to see the image that much. This coming week I’m going to do one all out of a red/pink color for more focus on color than picture quality.

And it makes a great hat, too!!

Ever since I did the iPhone rotation, I’ve taken many pictures of old, classic cars. This was started because I have a 1968 red convertible Chevelle and I found that it makes a very good subject. Since then, I’ve developed the habit of photographing any classic car that I see.

I really enjoy capturing the mood of the car by focusing on the hood ornaments and other metal details on the car, including the name script. I’m going to continue this photography project forEVERRRR.

Butterfly! Highlighted folded stage! (Taken with instagram)

Photogami! 1st atempt (Taken with instagram)

The goal for the event photography rotation is to take pictures of a Menlo event and edit them to make them accurate. No funky photoshop coloring (so I did that for my mini-exhibit as you already know ;) ) I decided to go photograph the G-Block dance class and to be artistic with these photos. I found meaning in what I was photographing by isolating certain body parts and also avoiding faces. I wanted the dancers’ movements to speak for themselves. Also, you could tell that a lot of them were uncomfortable to be photographed and that showed on their faces, but not in their bodies. So by trying to avoid the face, I was able to get to the true dynamic of the class, as though I weren’t even there.

The challenges of this rotation were all caused by the setting I chose. The dance room has really rather poor lighting and that made my life difficult, but it was still worth it. The lighting meant that my aperture had to be open as wide as possible at all times, and as a result all of my photos have a shallow depth of field. This is annoying because the camera also did not focus very fast so a lot of times the wrong thing would be in focus. At the same time this was a good thing because it forced me to re-think my shots and consider them from a different focal point. The shallow depth of field also contributed excellently to my goal of isolating body parts and capturing just a piece of the movement of the dancers. Another problem caused by the lighting was that all of my pictures came out discolored. Almost all of them were blue tinted, but there were several that were yellow tinted. So, the first thing I did in photoshop for every picture was to slide around the color balances until skin colors looked accurate. However, a lot of times the dance floor came out as this really beautiful shade of blue and I liked it much better than the actual black so I would then create a mask over the color balance layer and reveal the original blue tinted floor which ended up looking rather nice in the pictures.

I highly encourage whoever still has event left to take an idea of something you want to try and apply it to this rotation because otherwise it will get boring.