Category: Student Posts (Page 2 of 5)

For my final project, I decided to do a series of portraits and take 10 pictures of 10 people. My theme will be finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. I will take pictures of people going about their daily lives or in ordinary environments to show the beauty and importance as it’s easy to lose sight of the beauty all around us in everyday moments of daily life in a world where the exceptional is frequently the focus. My goal with this series of portraits is to draw attention to the seemingly ordinary while highlighting the depth and importance that surround regular everyday life. 

The assignment I most enjoyed was window light portraits. Using diffused light from windows or the outdoors enables the making of portraits that capture the beauty of daylight. Natural light, as compared to artificial lighting arrangements, has a gentle, attractive mood that may bring out the subject’s features and produce a cozy, welcoming atmosphere in the pictures. I found this assignment interesting because working with natural light was exciting and challenging as you need to be creative about it. To obtain the right lighting effects, you must adjust and experiment with various angles and positions because you have no control over the light source itself. This challenge pushes you to think outside the box and try new approaches. 

For this assignment, I will consider asking friends and family members to be my subjects. They will be comfortable being photographed and can spend some time with me near a window during the day or even with proper room lighting. I will be shooting both indoors and outdoors just to experiment and at the end decide which pictures look better with my techniques. I believe that to get excellent pictures, I have to help my subjects express themselves honestly and freely. I need to talk to them to gain real emotions and expressions and let them express themselves without restriction. Remain calm and be prepared to capture candid moments.

I will be experimenting with different framing techniques, but close-up shots, medium shots, and eye-level will be my main techniques.

For my final project, I am preferring to do my own theme. My theme will be Transit Subways Scapes.

My favorite interest for this project is rule of thirds and depth of field. Rules of thirds will look great on my subjects because it focuses on the subject while having a scenery background for the subject. Depth of field is useful towards subways and buses scapes. For example, I can shoot a subway photo in an above ground station. With the depth of field I can zoom in the train and having a focus of the train along the other subway cars following behind it.  If I would shoot an underground station with the train coming in, I will need to adjust the exposure of the camera to have a better light quality.

Sometimes, we do not appreciate public transit as much as for commuters. I think personally, I like public transit. There are some underrated beauty of the subway that commuters miss most of the time. It doesn’t matter where you are late to work or going somewhere to be. We are all riding the same subway car.

We all have almost the same story as commuters to get to our place and we have to look back at it. We are all there to have something to get to our destination alive. Trains come and go to our daily lives that we have something productive to do in our lives.

My photography shoots will be taken most of them in a above ground station because of the scenery that the trains go through. I will be going through different boroughs of NYC to look for places that have a fantastic scenery along with it.

Photo 1 – James Maher

Photo 2 = Emma Taggart

Photo 3 – Jeenah Moon

Photo 4 – Gary Hershorn

Photo 5 –  Osugi

Photo 6 – Chris Hondros

My theme is exploring a popular district of New York that hasn’t changed. Some areas of New York have changed drastically over the years due to gentrification but this is one of the very few areas that still looks untouched. This time of year is the season I look forward to the most because of the cherry blossom trees, the warm weather, and the icy lady. Although I’ve lived in New York for over 20 years, there are some places I’ve never been around. I’ve decided Soho is the perfect place to take pictures. This part of the city showcases some of the essences of the city such as vintage architectural style, luxury, fashion, and art. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be capturing a variety of shots such as the buildings, some portraitures of “fashion” people, and art galleries, at different times of the day, and weather conditions. Some techniques that we’ve learned I’ve enjoyed doing such as reflections and freeze/ blur motion.