Category: Homework Instructions (Page 2 of 2)

Midterm Project – Make it Quote

October 5, 2021 / rmichals / 0 Comments

10 pts. The midterm assignment is to create a photograph that addresses a social issue by quoting a famous painting or photograph, inspired by Gordon Parks’ American Gothic.

1 pt. Write a post of 300 words on OpenLab that answers the following questions:

In your opinion, what is a social issue that doesn’t get enough attention? It can be any issue you care about and that is relevant to your life. State the issue and three reasons it is important. Include one link to an article or web resource that gives background information about the issue you selected.

2. Then select a famous painting or photograph that you will quote to make the statement of your final image clear and meaningful to your audience.

What image did you select?
Why did you select that image?
What aspects of the image will you quote?
How will it enhance your message?

Use the category: Midterm Project Statement

Then shoot a minimum of 20 images to explore your idea.

You might try to quote different images, experiment with different locations, models, props, ways of shooting including angle of view, depth of field, motion, lighting

Post these to an album on Flickr.

Project Deliverables

Week 1 – Due October 12th

Midterm Project Statement
an album of a minimum of 20 images that show your exploration of your idea. You might try to quote different images, experiment with different locations, models, props, ways of shooting including angle of view, depth of field, motion, lighting to explore your idea.

Week 2 – Due October 19th

Pick a one direction. Explore it further. Post an album on Flickr of a minimum of 20 images that shows your thought process and how you got to your final image. For each image add a caption that explains what you did.

Here is an example from my own work.

These are examples from a series I am doing on household chemicals.
I shot 217 frames to get to the final image.

I started with an image in my mind of a line of glasses of orange juice broken by a glass with Windex.
The line of equal sized glasses was boring so I started to move the glasses so that they were at varying distances from the camera.
I realized the orange juice while an appealing complimentary color as distracting.
I had this accident with a piece of red paper and I realized holding a piece of paper above the scene could reflect that color into it.
I placed a blue paper on one side to get the blue to reflect on the left side of the photo. this represents how the chemicals do not stay in their container.
I added blue paper to the other side.
I moved things around to reduce extraneous reflections and checked the focus.

Due Oct 26th

a short presentation of the image you are quoting and your final image. Be prepared to show the original image and your final image. You can do this by putting them in one file or Lightroom Classic or Bridge. Your presentation should include:
a. Some background on your issue
b. Why you chose the reference image you did
c. Anything interesting about your process
d. The meaning and success of your final image

Project Rubric

midtermProjectRubric

Examples

American Gothic

Mona Lisa

Will.i.am Mona Lisa – music video on youtube

Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel

The Son of Man

Resources

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/most-famous-paintings/index.html

20 Famous Paintings From Western Art History Any Art Lover Should Know

https://www.digitalphotomentor.com/20-most-famous-photographs/

http://100photos.time.com

HW 4 – Freezing Motion

September 28, 2021 / rmichals / 0 Comments

In class, we worked with long exposures and shutter speeds of full seconds.

In this homework assignment, explore the opposite- freezing motion. Use very short shutter speeds. if you are working with your phone and are getting motion blur, shoot with the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom app. It will allow you to control the shutter speed and ISO.

Working outside in the day, freeze the motion of athletes and bike riders, dancers, jumping dogs. Try at least two different types of subjects ie soccer players and bikers, kids on swings and dancers. Capture the decisive moment. The soccer player when their leg is fully stretched out in a kick, a bike rider doing a wheelie. Don’t be shy. Fill your frame with the action. Please do not hand in any photos where the figures are tiny spots in the distance.

1/800 will freeze most motion. Try even faster shutter speeds for really fast motion close to the camera such as water in a fountain. Because these speeds are so fast and let in little light, make sure to work outside during the day. It will be very difficult to get sharp motion of a basketball game at twilight and really easy at 12 noon.

If using a camera, use predictive focus AI Servo or AF-C .

Post 15 shots of at least two different activities to an album on Flickr for a total of 30 shots. Please don’t include all of the times you missed: shots out of focus, the back of receding bike riders, etc. Just your best work.

4 pts. Due October 5th, 6 pm.

If you have a camera and a tripod, you may experiment with painting with light for the homework.

HW2: Angle of view

September 14, 2021 / rmichals / 0 Comments

4 pts. The goal: Photograph the same subject from different angles of view and with different cropping to make a pair of photographs of the subject that are very different both in composition and mood.

Repeat for a total of 15 DIFFERENT subjects.

Work outside during the day in good light.

Select a range of subjects to work with. (No street furniture: garbage cans, hydrants, street lights.) Make your subject look big in one and small in another, symmetrical and asymmetrical, cute and fierce, pretty and ugly, strong and delicate just with the crop and angle of view that you use. Use a range of opposites in your ten pairs.

Put your 30 photos in an album on Flickr.

Select your best pair of photos – meaning the one in which the subject is most radically transformed – and send them to the class group.

HW3: Near and Far

February 18, 2021 / rmichals / 0 Comments

4 pts. Due September 28th.

Work outside during the day.

For cameras and cameraphones

Take 30 photos in which there is something in the foreground and something in the background, something near the camera and something far from the camera. Use perspective to create a strong sense of dept.

Put the 30 photos on an album in Flickr. Send your best two to the class group.

Due: September 28, 2:30 pm

Camera

Use shallow depth of field to make either the foreground or the background out of focus. Sometimes focus on the object closest to the camera and sometimes to the object farthest from the camera.

To achieve shallow depth of field, use the Av shooting mode and set the aperture to the widest- lowest number – setting. Zoom in and get close to the subject in the foreground.

Cameraphones

You can either create a series of closeups that have shallow depth of field or use software such as Focos to simulate shallow depth of field.

Camera Phones and Depth of Field

Camera phones have a fixed aperture. For example, the aperture of the iPhone 7 is f1.8. This is one of the things that makes cameraphones so good in low light. You might think this wide open aperture would make it easy to get shallow depth of field with a cameraphone. However, the other factors involved make it quite challenging to achieve shallow depth of field with a cameraphone.

When you look at a phone, you can see the challenge for focal length. Focal length is the distance between where the light converges in the lens and the sensor and there just isn’t that much space. Even for cameraphones, we use the size of 35 mm film as the standard when discussing focal length. So the iPhone 11 has three lenses that are the 35 mm equivalent of 13mm, 26mm and 52mm. Earlier phones with one camera have one focal length. If working with a camera phone with more than one lenses, use the telephoto choice to create shallow depth of field.

Camera to subject distance is the factor that gives you the most control of depth of field when working with a camera phone. To create shallow depth of field bring the camera as close as possible to the subject. Allow for some actual space behind the subject

It is the small size of the sensor that makes cameraphones so good at achieving extensive depth of field. It is also the main reason it is so hard to get your cameraphone to achieve shallow depth of field.

Depth of field created by software

To solve this problem, cameraphones use software. You may have Portrait Mode on your phone or you can download any number of Apps including Focos which I used for this example. I think this is pretty typical. Overall, the software did a good job of softening the background but it could not tell that the ear on the left should be sharp.

HW1: Gordon Parks

February 1, 2021 / rmichals / 0 Comments

Working with the Gordon Parks photo assigned to you, start by reading the biography of Gordon Parks on the Gordon Parks Foundation website

https://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/gordon-parks/biography

and the resource given below for that photo. Write down on paper the three main points from the biography and three main points from the resource. Take a photo of your notes and attach it to your final post. You may use other sources as well as long as you credit those sources.

Write two paragraphs in response to the photograph:

Paragraph 1: Describe the photo.

What is the subject matter of the photograph?
What are the main characteristics of the composition? Use at least two terms from the Week 1: Composition Review page.

Paragraph 2: What is the meaning of the photo?

Put the photo into context. When and where was the photo taken? Take this beyond the year and the location. What were the important events of the time that we need to know about to understand the photograph? Who are the people in the photo and what is their significance? What was Parks’ intention when he took that photo? What ideas and/or feelings does the photo convey?

Photo 1 – Diana Florissant, Darius Freeman, Lorena Gonzalez