Final

here are some pictures you can click on

This week I commented on Mallory’s and Erin’s blogs.

Music Photography

I was pretty bored, so I decided to google music photography.  When I did this I found Ami Barwell’s website. Ami Barwell is a self-proclaimed Rock and Roll photographer, and I really like her images.  Most of her work is done in black and white.  It is really recognizable though because there is such a contrast between black and white in her pictures, and there is not a whole lot of grey.  I’m not sure how she does this, I’m guessing photoshop.  Whether these pictures are edited or not, they really stuck with me.  It’s like she could capture the attitude of the musician’s in her images and the attitude was conveyed in the whole look of her portfolio.  I couldn’t get any photos from her website, so I would encourage you to look around there.

Guitar, this one is really cool, too

This one is my favorite.

Guitar Player

The only thing though its that you can’t always tell who the picture is of.  But at the same time, I do not think that that is very important in these photos because she captures the attitude of the musician, and that is what you see instead of their faces.  We can see that she does focus on the musician in the press shots section of her website.  Also, if you have a chance check out her album covers section.  These are really cool and some of them show her using color images.  It’s interesting to see how she uses color compared to stylized black and white photos.

Easter Weekend

Last weekend was Easter and I went and stayed at the Isle of Palms with my family.  My grandma rented out this pretty big house that had four floors, a pool, and all kinds of other stuff.  However my favorite place was the balcony on the top floor.  I brought my camera with me for the weekend, and for almost an hour on the first night I was on the balcony taking pictures, mainly doing stuff with shutter speeds.  I guess that is my favorite thing to mess around with since it is always what I’m talking about on here.  So here are a few of my favorite ones I took this weekend.

 

Isle of Palms

This is actually the moon, the sun was setting on the other side of me.  I wanted to take pictures of the moon that night because it was a really bright orange.  I took some on slower shutter speed where you could tell it was night time.  This one was taken with a 30 second shutter speed.  It captures so much light that I think it looks more like the sun rising than the moon.

 

Palm Trees on the Street

Here is another one of my really slow shutter speed pictures.  This one shows where the sun was setting while I was taking the pictures.  I like this one a lot because of the way the headlights from the cars light up the palm trees.  They light them from the inside and I think it was cool to see the trees lit from that way instead of a flash or the sun which would have lit up the side we typically see.

 

The House Across the Street

This is one of the house across the street from the one we stayed in.  I like this one because of the way that the lights on the porch became so bright and really make the house stand out from the dark sky in the background.

 

The Street and the Moon

This last one is my absolute favorite.  It mixes all the things I like about the other pictures.  We have the bright moon lighting up the sky and showing the detail in the clouds.  The headlights from the cars light up the palm trees lining the streets.  The stationary street lights become very bright and I think that catches the eye of the audience because they look like bright white stars.

Final Project

I thought I would show a few pictures for my final this week.  I’ve been taking pictures of my friend Olivia to show how she contrasts from “average” college students.  Her three heroes in life are Paula Deen, Sandra Lee, and Martha Stewart, so you can see tat she enjoys cooking, cleaning, entertaining, and making sure everything is perfect.

Olivia cooking for Mexican night

Olivia doing the dishes in a dress, while her roommate watches in a towel.

 

I went ahead and her pose for a portrait.

I really didn’t make her wear the dress and pearls for these pictures, that is how she typically dresses for school and work and then comes home and prepares dinner for whoever is home: her roommates, boyfriend, or me with my camera haha.  

Oh and this week I commented on Jennifer’s blog here.

Light Painting

 

Light Painting with glow sticks

 

 

So for my photo series in class I thought it would be cool to have my friends play with glow sticks and I would take pictures on slow shutter speeds. I just called them my glow in the dark pictures but the industry term is light painting.  I had a lot of fun doing this project and my friends are actually begging me to do it again, go figure.

This one definitely reminds me of Jesus, I think it might be my favorite haha

 

 

I think this is something that every photographer should try to do.  It was interesting trying to make different shapes, and  figuring how long of a shutter speed we would need to pull a certain thing off.  Here a few more pictures where we tried making drawings of things.

 

Peace

 

Love

 

Happiness

 

Fire

 

Water

The palmetto and moon for South Carolina haha

That was a lot of pictures, but it was really hard to pick which ones I liked the best out of all the ones I took.

 

And the last one, my intials

Leroy Grannis

 

Leroy Grannis' photo of surfboards on the beach

So since my last post was on surf photography, I went out to Barnes and Noble and found a book that was a collection of photos by Leroy Grannis.  He is known for his surf photography from the 60′s and 70′s.  These were interesting to see because this was the time right when surfing became popular in the US, and you can see how different it was back then.  In his pictures the brightly colored surfboards and swimsuits stand out because of their color against the tan sand, grey waters and blue skies.  I think these pictures stand out because of these bright colors.  I think it’s cool that even though he did not have the same technology as the photographers in my last post, his pictures stick with you just as much as the others do.

He also captured the lifestyle of surfers in southern California and Hawaii alike.  He would show the surfers in other aspects of their lives when they are not at the beach.  This is how his pictures came back around to really tell a story almost.  He would show them with their families, going out to eat or just hanging around with friends.  This is one of my favorites he did.  It is a picture of a group of surfers doing something else they love, riding bikes around town.

Riding around Hermosa Beach

 I think it might also be them time in American culture when these pictures were taken that I like so much.  From people’s hairstyles and clothing to the model of the bikes and colors of the surfboards, I think that things just looked cooler back then haha.  My parents did always tell me that I should have grown up in the 60′s with them.

Surf Photograpy

 

By Stuart Gibson

After we did our sports assignment, I got pretty interested in the area.  I started looking at all kinds of pictures and I found that my favorites were ones of surfing.  Maybe it’s because I’ve always been a swimmer and I love te ocean and water that I like these photos best.  I think water always makes interesting content in a photo because of its’ movement, and when you add in someone surfing it adds action to it as well.  I also think that I would enjoy the lifestyle this genre would bring with it.  I mean I could deal with just hangin out on the beach taking pictures of people having fun all day.  Here are a few more of my favorites that I found.

 

By Ben de Camp

By Greg Martin

By Rod Owen

 The one taken by Ben de Camp is by far my favorite.  I love the colors in it, all the shades of bright blue and turquoise.  It’s also really interesting because it was taken underwater. I think it being underwater pulled the focus from the surfer making him just a silhouette and made the viewer notice how the surfer affects the water.  You can see all the ripples, bubble and the wake from his board behind him lit up by the sun.

A Portrait

Here is one of my favorite portraits.  It’s a picture of James Dean taken by a guy named Dennis Stock in 1955.  I like it because I think it shows more than just a picture of him in a restaurant but it shows what kind of guy James Dean was.  What I like most about the picture is the framing how the main focus of the picture is only in the lower right corner of the picture.  But then his one arm stretches out and the cigarette smoke stretches up, so it really fills the frame well.  After reading some about Dennis Stock I found out that this and other pictures of James Dean are what made Stock famous and his work was called the first celebrity portraits.  He also took a lot of other really good pictures during the time from the late 50′s to the early 70′s which is my favorite time in American culture.  So if you get a chance you should go to his website.  Besides all that James Dean looks pretty BA in this picture and thats all i really aspire to be in my life.

Funny Night

So my friend Kathryn and I were pretty stoked about the fourth Indiana Jones movie.  So stoked we bought our midnight premiere tickets a few weeks in advance.  So here we go, we sit down and about two hours later we were left extremely disappointed, I mean aliens?  Really?  I did NOT enjoy it.  Now my friend Kathryn always plays on the safe side and never really does anything that would break any sort of rule, ever.  In fact, she’s kinda like a mom that keeps me from doing fun stupid things.  One thing that stands out about Kathryn is her obsession with High School Musical and its star Zac Efron.  And one thing that stood out about that movie theater that night was the life sized cardboard cut-outs  of the stars of High School Musical 3.  Now as I said, Kathryn never had anything to do with vandalism or sneaking out type things we did in high school, so you can imagine my shock when she said it would be a good idea to steal these life sized cut-outs.  I told her I wasn’t going to do it because after many run-ins with the cops I was pretty sick of getting caught doing stupid crap and I continued on my way towards the exit.  All of a sudden I hear “RUUUUUNNNNNNN!!!” from behind me to see my five-foot-tall-never-does-anything-bad-ever friend Kathryn running holding two six foot tall people above her head.  So of course I ran as fast as I could and became the getaway driver.  I tell you, I don’t think Nina the Nissan had ever seen such excitement when I got in the car: I mean Kathryn did something immoral!  Next I pulled some James Bond spy car moves and swerved around as she was prepared to throw the two people in (she stole me the hottie Vanessa Hudgens).  As we left we looked out the back windshield to see two of the theater’s employees laughing hysterically cause they had witnessed the whole thing.  I guess they didn’t care because I never got in trouble for it, and we still have Disney channel stars hanging out in our rooms.  Maybe it was something where you had to be there, or maybe you need to know Kathryn and how conservative she is (like an old lady) but to me tis is of the funniest things I did in 2008.  I wish I had a picture of her short self running with two posters that were a good foot taller than her but this is the best I could do:

Haha Stealing these posters totally made going to see Indiana Jones 4 worth it.

And if you are wondering, yes we did go see High School Musical 3 in theaters at a midnight screening.  It was much better than Indiana Jones 4.

Another favorite picture

 

Getting ready to blow out the candles.

Here’s another one of my favorite pictures I’ve taken.  This is what at one of my friend’s birthday parties at my apartment last year.  Since her birthday is in December we decided to make the theme Ho Ho Ho’s if you were wondering about her outfit.  I got this picture during the big highlight of the night: when the cake came out.  Her roommate (holding the cake) made it and the birthday girl was pretty stoked about it, I mean everybody loves birthday cake you know.  I think this is a pretty good picture because you can see how happy she is that we did all this work for her birthday.  I also think the colors in it are cool, how there is a lot of pink and white around her in her clothes and in the cake, but everything else is dark colors.