Week 10

Week 8 Weekly Photo: Controversy

I took this image when I was living in china. This image of a terra-cotta soldier holding hands with a small girl was strangely disturbing. At the end of the tour, in a sort of regrouping area, there is a giant warrior marionette puppet holding the hand of a girl puppet. The warrior is giving the little girl serious side eye. For those who never heard of the terracotta soldiers before. Over the past 35 years, archaeologists have located some 600 pits, a complex of underground vaults as yet largely excavated across a 22-square-mile area. Some are hard to get to, but three major pits are easily accessible, enclosed inside the four-acre Museum of the Terracotta Army, constructed around the discovery site and opened in 1979. In one pit, long columns of warriors, reassembled from broken pieces, stand in formation.With their topknots or caps, their tunics or armored vests, their goatees or close-cropped beards, the soldiers exhibit an astonishing individuality. A second pit inside the museum demonstrates how they appeared when they were found: some stand upright, buried to their shoulders in soil, while others lie toppled on their backs, alongside fallen and cracked clay horses. The site ranks with the Great Wall and Beijing's Forbidden City as one of the premier tourist attractions within China. This image i felt as if the statue of the soldier was looking down left at the little girl but secretly looking not a full head turn but only the eyes. This wouldn't be an issue if the soldier looked to the left with his head turned but the fact that only his eyes are looking at the girl kind makes it creepy. The girls eyes are hollowed out and nothing but blackness is seen in her eyes. Either this was intentional or this was a just something that the creator missed. 

Week 7 Weekly Photo: Adult Content

This weeks challenge was to recreate a vintage adult photography. I decided to use one of my photos I took recently of a model posing on a couch. My goal was to be able apply a cool effects that would make this image look like an old vintage photo. The issue I ran into was that the style of the photo that I took was a bit too modern. The lighting and quality of the image was very high and I spent most of my time trying to downgrade the image and make it look old. Which was surprisingly more difficult than I thought. I first added a film grain look to the image. With the film grain look I had to adjust it from size, intensity, and spread. Using other image references I found that the old films that they use to take these photos weren't necessarily bad it was very uniques and organic and varies between every shot and film stock. The common issue I found with the old vintage images where the lens and quality of the look. This was the downfall of the old cameras. Some vintage images had a great lens which made the image look sharp and clear while other where a bit faded. I believe this had to do with the decomposition of the film itself. It could be very possible that when the photo was originally shot and processed the image must of have been pretty clear and beautiful. Although I don't expect that some person was able to time travel back then and get there hands on a freshly process photo and was able to digital scan it then came back to post it online. Although there are a number of photographers that attempted to recreate the the old vintage look and some where very accurate and believable and the others where just to modern and didnt fit it.

Week 6 Weekly Photo: Collage

A collage is a work of art composed of numerous materials, such as paper, newsprint, photographs, ribbons or other objects attached to background support, such as plain paper. A collage can even be made with physical materials or electronic images, attaching them to a digital background. Originating from the French word "coller", meaning "to glue", the collage allows you to experiment with a wide range of materials to achieve amazing end results. This article provides a sample of the many possibilities limited only by your creativity and imagination. By definition, a collage should be made up of several different pieces. Those pieces can be made of all sorts of items, such as paper, yarn, fabric, stamps, magazine cut-outs, plastic, raffia, foil, labels, lids, matchsticks, corks, natural items (bark, leaves, seeds, eggshells, seashells, twigs, etc.), buttons, and so forth. You can either choose one medium such as paper or fabric, or you can make an eclectic mix, such as paper, buttons and foil. My Collage was compiled through photoshop. And instead of using a variety of images I used the same image but split up the different sections with different effects. The original image was taken at Hyde Bellagio during one of their nightclub events. The DJ is locally known as DJ Loczi a local resident DJ that often plays at Bellagio. This Night I was a photographer and I brought one of my lenses with the intent to create a cool image. The lens I used was a 15mm Fisheye from Canon. My settings set to shutter speed 1/100s and the F-stop was set to F4 and the ISO was set to 2000.  The goal was to be able to capture a symmetrically composed shot behind his DJ  boards. I was able to time out the shot perfectly where he was raising his hands up and the background was lit by a wall of LEDs.