Concentration

Going into my concentration I was unsure of whether or not I should create a more narrow category for myself than "urban exploration" in general. Trying to decide which photographs to include in my 8 photo checkpoint revealed the true breadth of the category and allows me to narrow down my selection to specifically concentrate on openings in the spaces (e.g. doorway, windows, etc). Going forward I will focus on narrowing down the aesthetic of this concentration to present a coherent body of work. This is not only relevant in photo selection, but also when I actually go out to shoot. Lastly, I will focus on ways I can improve the photographs in post-processing that go beyond basic photoshop.

Bacteria Final

This steam project focused on photographing bioluminescent bacteria as they grew and died. To begin, we were given 8 petri dishes and asked to create a pattern or design that we would grow the bacteria in. When shown the pictures of bioluminescent bacteria my mind immediately jumped to space. I’ve always had a fascination with the beauty of space, and the appearance of the bacteria was strikingly similar to something that could’ve come from the Hubble Telescope. I picked the Ant Nebula, one of the most beautiful and dramatic celestial bodies to base my design off of. Besides the similarities in appearance, I was also drawn to the dichotomy of my design. The fact that microscopic bacteria can resemble something so large and far away was fascinating. Once the bacteria were placed on their respective petri dishes, we set them up in a dark room and took photographs, the exposures ranging from one to five minutes in the pitch-black room. My picture is a result of one of those exposures, edited to depict a purple glow to further the resemblance to a celestial body.

American Beauty

The final five pictures from my photo series based on American Beauty. I focused on dramatic lighting, red as an evocative theme, and the human body.

American Beauty Screenshots

I'll be doing my project taking intimate portrait shots in the cinematographic style of American Beauty. Throughout the movie there are portrait shots focusing on a specific character's face in tight frame, either with a dark background or with something emotive blurred out. Besides this, there are several shots focusing on body parts close up, illustrating sexuality and beauty. I plan to capture a combination of these two types of shots using the color red and roses which are a consistent visual theme throughout the movie

Studio Set-up vs. Found Pictures

Why would these images score higher on the AP rubric than images found in nature?

These images would score higher on the AP rubric due to the intentional nature of the photographs verses the "found" nature of photographs that are not staged. Beyond this, the work indicates multiple insights that are artificial as well as natural, and would therefore score higher on the AP rubric (6.D). The studio setting also means that in each successful pictures the materials must have been used successfully to express the artist's ideas (6.F) and that almost every picture will be created from the artist's original vision and ideas (6.B). The studio setting all but eliminates the possibility of near identical pictures of the same "found" scene in nature, because each picture is created from scratch. Finally, this setting forced a true investigation of aesthetics and ideas to solve design problems with the materials we possessed, some students spending an entire class period adjusting their set-up before beginning to photograph (6.A, 6.C). I concur that the photos from this project would achieve higher scores on the AP rubric than pictures found in nature. 

-Oelky