Class today went very well. I feel like I was able to get good feed back on my small collages. And I was only happy with about 2-3 of how my collages turned out. I felt like it was so hard to make the collages and take the pictures because I fell like I have no idea what I am photographing and so I'm just taking random pictures, which is not a good thing. It is difficult because you have an idea in your head of what you want your collage to look like, but then you are not quite sure how to make that idea real. I hope to continue to keep photographing and I hope for the best from this project.

Here are a few pictures of my collages so far:

My favorites were the Tea cup and AFH, but with the tea cup you can only go so far with 75+ photos.

Response to Errol Morris video:

    Photographs are connected to the real world. We investigate the world through photos and we document our findings by taking photos of it. Today many people do not know if a photograph is posed or not. Photos today are so manipulated and we as the viewer do not know what the difference is between truth and false photos. This not only applies to photographers, but also to graphic designers as well. Morris said "there's always an elephant outside the frame." You can never see the absence of something outside of the frame of the photo. The lens decontextualizes everything. Understanding photography is to pose more questions about what is outside of the frame and ask what is truth and what is false. From this video I realize how much I give into a photo. I lose myself in very good photography. Now that I have watched this video I realize how much I do not ask if it is fake or not, or if it has been edited or not. Nowadays it is so hard to tell if a photo has been edited or not. I found it interesting and kind of humorous with the story about the girl who snuck into the crime scene and took photos. If you want something bad enough, they you will do anything to get it, and would do anything to tell the truth about it. I feel like from now on I will be a little more curious as to what I am looking at in a photograph.

Ways of Seeing Response:

        It is amazing how perspective can produce a realistic image. Watching this video I never realized how much zooming in at a photo or zooming out could change the whole meaning or interpretation of that photo. I remember talking about how a piece of art is interpreted differently by which context it is viewed in when I was in Art History last semester. By not seeing the original piece of art or by not seeing it in its original context takes away from the interpretation and the experience. Its meaning has become transmittable. I wish I was able to travel more too see the original art pieces. I could not even imagine how amazing that would be. The picture itself produces so much emotion and meaning by its composition and details. I thought it was interesting that background music can change the mood of a painting so drastically. I had never thought of that before. That is why it is so important for the artist to arrange the composition and all the finer details so that they get the viewer to recognize what they want them to recognize or make the viewer feel how they want the viewer to feel. Towards the end of the video I was impressed by how the children interpreted Carivagio's painting. They picked up on so much detail, some things that I, myself, would not have picked up on. I will now be skeptical of how images are arranged because we only see what the artist wants us to see.

Susan Sontag's "On Photography":

        The introduction to this piece really got me thinking about how much photography has been and is being used around the world. It seems that we used it to document everything now. But of course it is probably the easiest and most straight forward way to document a place, person, or event. Especially in today's society where everything is electronic and no one really uses books or paintings anymore. I am just an amateur photographer. I have job shadowed a photographer once and did not really get anything out of it. I know nothing about photography. Reading these articles doesn't help me learn how to photograph, but they give me a better insight on how photography has changed over the years and to tell me why we photograph things in our lives. In the article I liked when Sontag mentioned that photography gives us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads. Photography gives people power over being able to capture so many things that other people are not able to see. Photography is in some cases a way of note-taking for many reasons, like Sontag said. I found it interesting that Sontag said, "A photograph is not an accident", and also that "There is an element of luck in most great pictures". I have not gotten the element of luck yet, but hopefully with this project and a few photo classes I will be lucky enough to get some great shots.

Roland Barthes "Camera Lucida":

        What I really found interesting in Barthes's article was his own opinion on what a photograph was to him. He was not speaking for anyone else, but himself. I guess his voice spoke to me through this article than the others. I also thought the fact when Barthes's stated, "The date belongs to the photograph: not because it denotes a style, but because it makes me lift my head, allows me to compute my life, death, inexorable extinction of the generations." Just reading how he interprets a photo really started to get me thinking of how and why I interpret photos. He gave me things to think about for the next time I look at a photo; from past or present. "The photograph's presence is to ratify what it represents." He is saying that a photo is simply just a photo, it "fills the sight by force." I take it from reading this that Barthes is not necessarily a big fan of photographs, and to hear the complete opposite from the other articles, it makes my mind wander. In some ways I can agree with Barthes, but in other cases I cannot. I only see the history within photos, but Barthes sees violence.

First Day of Second Semester!!!!!

        Well, I'm sad to say that I am more than happy to be back in the swing of things here at KU. I am actually really excited about this semester. BDS 102 and the Color Theory class. A little nervous, but I just need to have fun with them and make the time useful to the best of my abilities.

       Today in class we were introduced to our first project of the semester. It is about photographically depicting time and space. I have a couple ideas of what I might like to do. I was thinking of either photographing Mass Street, some river or something in nature, a car driving away, or basketball when the players run out or are shooting, or something to do with cheerleading. I want to try to pick something that is meaningful to me so that I will be able to get a full handle on the project.



Also today in class we watched a few videos, the first one was Masters of Illusion:

        In the video they talked about vanishing points and linear perspective, which was a lot of what I had learned last semester in my drawing class and my art history class. The fact that a vanishing point can change a one  dimensional picture to a two-demensional figure still amazes me. And as I remember it is not that easy to do, especially with multiple vanishing points. That is one of the things I struggled most with last semester in drawing. I think it is very interesting that artists today still use the Renaissance styles and techniques. Special effects have become so advanced that it is sometimes hard to tell what is real and what isn't. These techniques are changing how we see the world everyday. Because I took art history and drawing last semester I did not learn anything new from this video from what I had already known. I feel that with Giotto's work on how he was very close to achieving linear perspective, even thought it was an approximate attempt to recede images into space, it happened to make the image look realistic to the viewers' eye. With this new project this is what we will be trying to do. We will continue to distort the space, but still make it look realistic and interesting instead of cluttered.

Response to David Hockney on What the Camera Can't Do:

         I think David Hockney has really interesting and emotional paintings. Especially when he was painting his mother. I feel like the "Summer Rain" painting is very lonely and dramatic. It depicts sadness, and even his paintings of his mother which depict her in time and space throughout her sickness until her passing. His work is very touching. I did happen to think that it was interesting that a "used to be" photographer was saying that he couldn't capture what the real eye could see. I was surprised to hear him say that he did not want to look through a camera. I feel like all spaces are photographical, even if it cannot all be captured within one photograph, but that is why we take multiple pictures. Photographing is a way of immediate documentation and it is very easy to get details and to get an accurate representation of the space. Even though painting is using a brush to document a space, it makes it different because painting is the artist's interpretation of the space, not what the actual human eye might see in full detail.

Response to The Photographer's Eye:

 "The Invention of Photography provided a radically new picture-making process-- a process based on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken." Like I was saying in my response to David Hockney, I agree with this quote. It really explains the difference between painting and photographing. That is what this article was about, about tell the reader not only the difference between photography and painting, but also why photography is so much better. I also happened to like the quote, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Photography has always interested me. It seems to be more difficult than it looks to be able to get the right shot, angle, or lighting. That's why in this certain BDS project I will be working more and more on those aspects of photography, and to be able to capture time and space of my object. In our projects we have to complete the act of choosing and eliminating, which will  force concentration on the picture's edge. It will be "exhibiting an infinite number of croppings -- of compositions -- as the frame moves onwards." In most words I agree so much with this article, I believe that photography documents so much of what our memories cannot hold onto. It represents the past and future and brings them to present times. With painting there is only so much that a brush can do. And as a painter, they interpret the objects in their own way, so it is not a realistic depiction. I feel photography will only become more helpful and innovative as time goes on.