Final Portfolio

Due 4/27

The final portfolio will consist of twenty jpegs (1200px), placed in the drop box on the server

Contents:

Project 1: 4 strongest images
Project 2: finished image
Project 3: 3-5 images, based on your project format (discuss with faculty)

The remainder of the 20 images may be pulled from any of the various exercises (color, point-of-view, light, retouching, etc.), and should be representative of your strongest images shot for the course.

Curate your portfolio carefully. Consult with classmates and faculty to gather a wider perspective. The portfolio should represent your very best efforts.

Project 3: Preliminary Critique

A	Tellis	Trevyon
A	Sagirs	Danielle
A	Miller	Justin
A	Hall	Dan
B	Marsh	Lucas
B	Griffin	Ramsey
B	Budnik	Brooke
B	Swindle	Eli
C	Simpson	Nicholas
C	Mcdaniel	Trent
C	Shaw	Wesley
D	Wydra	Kirsten
D	Creech	Archie
D	McCool	Cade

Members of Group A will critique all members of Group B

Members of Group B will critique all members of Group C

Members of Group C will critique all members of Group D

Members of Group D will critique all members of Group A

Fictional Reality: Prelim Critique

A	Griffin	Ramsey
A	Mcdaniel	Trent
A	Simpson	Nicholas
A	Wydra	Kirsten
B	Hall	Dan
B	Miller	Justin
B	Swindle	Eli
C	Budnik	Brooke
C	Marsh	Lucas
C	Sagirs	Danielle
C	Tellis	Trevyon
D	Creech	Archie
D	McCool	Cade
D	Shaw	Wesley

Members of Group A will critique all members of Group B

Members of Group B will critique all members of Group C

Members of Group C will critique all members of Group D

Members of Group D will critique all members of Group A

Project 3: Extending the image

Reading: Chapter 7

Prelim critique: 4/18

Final Critique:  4/27
Prints due: 4/27*
Large-format print files due: 4/25

* If you will be printing individual letter size, tabloid or Super B size prints, please do your own printing. If you will need oversized, large-format prints (say of grids or panoramas), please speak to instructor well in advance about setting up your files correctly and arranging for large-formal printing.

Background

Cartier Bresson...example of  "The Decisive Moment"

As photographers, the frame is perhaps our most important tool. With the camera, we "frame" our subjects, including what we feel is important for the picture, and excluding what isn't. Essentially, we are editing from the visual world with our frame. A common goal in photography is to try and get it all in one frame—to create a singular image that conveys our full expression, sharp, clear, with a single point of view. 

Further, we capture single points in time,  often orphaned from the longer story. They float, untethered without revealing what came before or after, or for that matter, what else was going on at that time. 

There's value in all this—but it can also be limiting!

How can we extend the story of a photograph? What happened before our  decisive moment? What happened after? What did the other person see? What about the fly on the wall? Sometimes we need multiple images, multiple frames to convey the breadth and richness of our visual story.

For this phase of the course, we will explore the following modes. For this project, explore one of the following below.

1. Narrative Sequence
2. Conceptual Series
3. Multiples (diptych/triptych)
4. Typology
5. Expressive formats

1. Narrative Sequence

How can photography be used to create a narrative sequence, to convey a story through time? Think about change and movement...what changes? What moves? What stays the same? How does this change tell a story?

Duane Michals (and here https://vimeo.com/40237404) used extended sequences of images to convey complex and (often amusing) narratives. Some of these visual story lines went in a straight lines, sometimes they made bizarre circles and spirals.

Grandpa Goes to Heaven, Duane Michals

Chance Meeting, Duane Michals

Countless photographers have borrowed his approach to make narratives of their own.

E.Sariozkan

elodie fougère

The Personal Telling of Story

Jennifer Shaw

New Orleans photographer Jennifer Shaw illustrates the trials her family faced during and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The images are told through the use of toys and figurines.

http://jennifershaw.net/hurricane-story/

Metaphoric narrative

The photographer Masaru Goto created a compelling narrative documenting the difficult subject of his mother's sickness, decline and eventual death. He draws a comparison between the life-cycle of cherry trees passing through the four seasons from the blossom stage through the shedding of leaves as extended metaphor for the phases of a human life, from full glory to eventual decline. The result is sad, but poetic and contemplative.

Ideas to get started:

• Create a character and story...depict this visually, telling the story through a sequence of images. Shoot in a way that links the images together in a coherent way.
• Choose or stage a sequence of actions and consequences that are related...show us the before, during and after in a compelling way. Even better, throw in a twist or surprise.
• Illustrate a recent (or current) news event using a fictional or illustrative approach. Instead of photographing the actual events, recreate the event in a compelling or believable way through a sequence of images
• Take a photo every hour for a day...document what you are doing or seeing. Or what someone else is seeing or doing. What stays the same in every photo? What changes?
• Same place different time...photograph the same place, the same way, but at a different time...vary by minute, hour, day, week...decide one method and keep it constant
• Same person different time...photograph the same person, the same way, but at a different time...vary by minute, hour, day, week...decide one method and keep it constant.

2. Thematic Conceptual Series

Andrew Moore captures how time and economic forces, seemingly beyond our control, can change a city. He depicts decaying structures related to the auto industry in Detroit, to tell a sad story of a city that was once a vibrant and thriving place. Each photograph carries an echo of the past, and is operates very tightly around the central idea. While each image is strong, the work should be considered the whole series, rather than the individual photos. 

Denis Darzacq creates images of individuals in ordinary settings that appear to defy gravity. The project gains strength through repetition and variation within this theme.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HonzF8LbLE

3. Multiples (diptych, triptych, etc.)

On more of a documentary, story-telling mode, Lucia Ganieva, creates rich biographical portraits of people relating their persona to their vocation, past, workplace, etc. using diptychs and triptychs. Notice how the frames work together to build meaning.

Uta Barth is a photographer of place. Instead of creating visual descriptions of places, like a traditional landscape photographer would do, she is more interested in evoking or suggesting how we experience places. Often working with multiple frames, she changes the scale, plane of focus (in some she focuses on the "space between" foreground and background), in an attempt to more closely mimic the process of human perception, as well as the passage of time.

4. Typology

Jeffrey Milstein creates a typology of aircraft.

Bernd and Hilla Becher are particularly associated with this mode of art

Jeff Brouws

Artists like these are concerned with cataloging and "collecting" with their camera. For instance, Brouws isn't interested in singular train cars, but the almost endless variations between numerous cars. Working with a mode called typology, he creates grids that simultaneously show similarity and contrast.

Idis Khan quite literally quotes Bernd and Hilla Becher's work with industrial architecture, but layers the multiple variations of structures within a single frame instead of a grid.

There is a long history in photography of objectification based on race, gender, stereotypes and notions of the "other". African Americans have been notably objectified in this way. Photographer Myra Greene turns the tables on this history with her clever and effective series: "My White Friends".

5. Expressive formats

Essentially these are a form of what the book author terms joiners, or many-make-one, extended images that functions like fragmented panoramas both vertically and horizontally. David Hockney is well known for working this way. The following images, by Hockney, show some variations of this approach. How do they differ?

This last Hockney image begins to imply the passage of time—in particular, the time it takes to shift one's gaze, looking around a room, or having a conversation. Uta Barth, mentioned above, also references the time we take to experience and perceive reality, often working with diptychs that reveal a few minutes' difference in time.

Margaret Hiden is explores how family histories can be told through narratives that blend the past and present to form richer tapestry of telling. Here, images function much like memory... where our present is continually colored by the echos of the past.

Michael Taylor explores how light and time relate, creatine some very interesting abstracted imagery.

Project Description

For this project, create imagery in an extended format that engages a strong concept. Choose one:

Narrative Sequence

Conceptual Series

Multiples (diptych/triptych)

Typology

Expressive formats

The content and concept are as important as format. Think it through.

Output methods... what you will physically make and turn in

• For series and sequence, a digital book can be a nice format. Digital books from blurb or Apple would represent your final prints. Letter size physical prints are also fine. 

• For grids and multiple images, generate large file that includes all the supporting images. If you are doing a grid, this would mean one file depicting the grid. For diptychs, this would mean building one file that contains two images. 

• How much to do? If you are doing diptychs or triptychs, turn in at least 5 separate ones. If you are doing a series, aim for 8-12 images. It depends on your project—discuss with instructor. 

• All of your individual photos that go into this project should be edited appropriately in photoshop. This includes the skills covered so far in class: WP/BP, global tone adjustments (brightness and contrast using curves and/or camera raw), color adjustments, local adjustments (dodge and burn, blending mode curves with masks), sharpening. All Raw conversions must be smart objects.

• Jpeg versions: jpeg, quality 10+, sRGB, no longer than 1500 pixels in one direction (use image processor to set this up)

Some Student Work:

Prelim critique: Wednesday 3/4

White screen shooting

Avoid white garments or props

M=Monday photo shoot 3/7 

W=Wednesday photo shoot 3/9

M	Budnik	Brooke
M	Hall	Dan
M	Marsh	Lucas
M	Mcdaniel	Trent
M	Sagirs	Danielle
M	Simpson	Nicholas
M	Tellis	Trevyon
W	Creech	Archie
W	Griffin	Ramsey
W	McCool	Cade
W	Miller	Justin
W	Shaw	Wesley
W	Swindle	Eli
W	Wydra	Kirsten

Exercise: Restoration and Retouching

Due: 3/9

Choose an image to restore or retouch using the skills taught in class.

Turn in a layered, photoshop file that demonstrates an understanding of best practices:

• Decent resolution original (at least 5x7 @ 240 dpi).
• Straighten and crop
• Global adjustments: tone, contrast, color balance
• Dust, scratches, blemishes, other. Use designated layer, and/or conjoined layers, as necessary
• Local adjustments
• Print-ready (sharpened, etc.)

Keep/archive your full-resolution version, but turn in a reduced resolution version of 2400 pixels (longest dimension), layered PSD file.

Project 2: Fictional Photographic Reality, Composite

Due Dates:

• White Screen production shoot: Monday 3/7 and Wednesday 3/9
• Preliminary critique Monday 4/4
• Final critique:  Wednesday 4/6 

©Loretta Lux

©Kelli Connell

Create something that is both possible and impossible, at the same time. Explore the line between fantasy and reality.

Create a character and place them in an environment or situation that might be strange, surreal, or simply, weird. How is the line between fantasy—reality blurred? Consider myths, fairy tales, other stories. Or make something up.

Move beyond the simple and silly to something that works on multiple levels. What questions are raised? Beyond that, anything goes. There is plenty of room for creative interpretation. 

Think big for this one... costumes? styling? props?

Integrate the subject with the unlikely background/situation. Unify lighting direction, scale, point of view, shooting angle, etc., so that it truly appears that the subject is occupying the unlikely place.

There are just a few technical ground rules for this project.

1. At least one of the main subjects should be shot with white screen techniques
2. The white screen subject should be masked and appropriately integrated into the new background, with scale, perspective, point of view, light quality and direction convincingly matched.
3. The finished image should "read" realistically and convincingly as a single, genuine photo
4. At least 18" x 24" @300 dpi. All component pieces should be at adequate resolution

Gregory Crewdson
Grace Weston

Kahn and Selesnick

Bill Finger

Patrick Nagatani

Sarah Anne Johnson

Loretta Lux

Wendy McMurdo

Kelli Connell

Cornelia Hediger

Gillian Wearing

Student Work:

Exercise 5: Light

For Monday 2/29

Read chapter 5

Complete exercise on page 164, with the following modifications:

ISO up to 400 is okay

Choose *one* of the suggested settings, "urban," "residential," or "natural," rather than all three.

The setting may or may not have a person/figure...up to you, but keep it consistent for all images

Photograph in this setting with at least two very different qualities of light. For example, cloudy and sunny, or morning and early evening.

Bring to class:

1. All images from exercise
2. Also bring photographs (physical or digital) that would benefit from either restoration, retouching, or both.

Group Prelim Critique

A	Griffin	Ramsey
A	Mcdaniel	Trent
A	Simpson	Nicholas
B	Hall	Dan
B	Miller	Justin
B	Swindle	Eli
C	Budnik	Brooke
C	Marsh	Lucas
C	Sagirs	Danielle
C	Tellis	Trevyon
D	Creech	Archie
D	McCool	Cade
D	Shaw	Wesley
D	Wydra	Kirsten

Members of Group A will critique all members of Group B

Members of Group B will critique all members of Group C

Members of Group C will critique all members of Group D

Members of Group D will critique all members of Group A

Point-Of-View, in-class

Groups

Boswell	Olivia	A
Duff-Gordon	Jon	A
Japal	Caroline	A
Picazo	Alex	A
Sturgill	Ginny	A
Bramlett	Prestley	B
Glasscock	Rachel	B
Llewellyn	Nick	B
Satcher	Jamie	B
Wachs	John	B
Clay	Alayna	C
Gosney	Eden	C
Moore	Brandon	C
Snow	Grant	C
Warner	Hannah	C
Dismuke	Abigail	D
Homan	Kalypso	D
Peters	Marcelle	D
Snowden	Ryan	D
Yarbrough	Alexa	D

In groups, explore the point-of-view images created by all members of your group. 

Questions to explore:

1. What are some of the points-of-view explored in the photographer's imagery...first person, third person, and omniscient. Which images are more engaging or exciting examples of these perspectives. Identify and discuss why...
2. How do the varied points-of-view change the "story"of the subject matter? How do we relate to the subject differently? 
3. Which point-of-view/subject combinations invite further interest or curiosity? Are there implications for further exploration that the photography might try?

Based on this group discussion and feedback, plan to turn in 9 images (1200 pixels per longest side, jpeg, quality 10, sRGB) by the end of class.

• For each of your scenarios shot, choose three most compelling POVs

Exercise 4: Point-of-view

Point of view is an important narrative device to orient the viewer toward the subject, or activity, depicted in the photograph. It places the viewer in the "scene" with varying degrees of distance, participation or complicity implied. 

The term "point-of-view" comes directly from literary theory, when it is used to describe the relationship between the narrator and the story line. For instance, when the narrator uses the words "I" and "we," they are usually recounting a story in which they were a participant. "I was reading my phone." This is called first-person. 

When they use "he", "she" or "it," they are using a third-person orientation, describing the story from a once-removed perspective. "She was reading her phone." Usually with third person, the information revealed in the story is still limited to what would reasonably be known by someone passing by.

In some cases, much more information is revealed. For example: "While reading her phone outside the Ferguson Center., a barista in Starbucks knocked over a pitcher of frothed milk. This might be called an omniscient point-of-view, where information is revealed from an privileged all-knowing (or "God's eye") perspective.

Point of view can be explored though many means:

• Distance to subject
• Angle to subject
• Focal length (wide versus zoom)
• Selective focus
• Depth-of-field
• Eye contact
• Empathic perspectives (for example, place camera next to subject's head, pointing out, so we witness what the subject sees)

The important question to ask...through who's eyes are we seeing? The subject's? Another participant? A stranger walking by? An all-seeing, all-knowing narrator?

What are the points of view depicted in the examples below? How might this affect the "story" or implied narrative of the photographs?

Due, 2/15:

Shoot three different scenarios, with a single subject. Explore the widest range of points-of-view possible for each scenario (10-15 per subject/scenario). Be deliberate... for each image, what point-of-view is being used? Try first, third and omniscient perspectives... see what you discover. 

Bring files to class. 

Project 1: Working a Meaningful Subject

©Duke

©Harris

© Craft

© Craft

©Pan

©Pan

©Pan

© Prestage

©Thornton

What is important to you in this world?

Develop a group of images around a concise subject, theme or idea. It will be helpful to be as specific as possible about your subject or idea.

For instance, if photographing "people," perhaps choose a single person and create an extended group of images, or perhaps create images in a subcategory, such as "activists," "cheerleaders," "smokers," etc.

If your interest is landscape, or places, consider choosing one place and exploring it thoroughly. Or alternatively, photograph as many variations of a certain category of place as you can find. For example, "back alleys of downtown Tuscaloosa," or "best hidden places on camps to take a nap."

If you like things, consider setting up an arrangement or still-life of meaningful objects. It can be helpful to do this on a table next to a window or on a porch, where you will have plenty of natural light.

If exploring an idea, perhaps work with something rather open ended, such as "daily routine," or "image is everything (or not)," or "my life in 5 years," etc.

A collection of haphazard images does not make for a strong project. Intention is important, as well as follow-through and a tight edit/image selection.

Work will be evaluated on:

• Clarity of idea/main subject/theme/concept
• Strength of images (framing, composition, etc.)
• Technical camera skills (sharp focus, solid exposures)
• Photoshop /image editing skills
• Whether project is adequately realized (follow-through)
• Print quality

Due Dates:

Prelim critique: 2/11 (Wednesday)

Final critique: 2/18 (Wednesday)

Portfolio of 10 exhibition-worthy images, 6 of these should be printed.