Basic Photography

Here is my egg picture. I played around with a few different surfaces, but I really liked the contrast of the black desk and the white egg. Getting the right angle also took a while because I wanted to get the most interesting light and shadow patters, without showing anything other than the egg or the desk (the rest of my roommate's room is not that interesting!).

Human emotion: nervous. This was taken of the feet of a dancer in my studio. She was in a beginning class and waiting for her turn. The first group was currently going through the sequence and she was starting soon. I really liked the way her feet seemed to almost be comforting each other. I also liked how the light was coming in from both the hallway and one of the main room lights, so she seems to be standing in the only spot of shadow. I'm not sure this was the best angle, but I had so little time to take it before she moved on, and there were many other features of the picture that I really liked, so I kept it.

The human body in motion. This picture was also taken at my studio, during the warm up for an intermediate class. All of the dancers were hanging around, getting their bodies moving and talking excitedly. This dancer was using the heel of one foot to stretch the arch of the other. I liked the asymmetry in the shapes she was making as she stretched. I took a few more, but they were either blurry from her movement or you could see my shadow. I probably should have taken the picture from behind her in order to more easily keep my shadow out of it.

This is my landscape. It it of the ridge behind Hunt. There were two main things I ended up really liking about this picture, one is the angle and one is the sky. The sky was such a bright shade of gray, inviting and bright instead of oppressive and gloomy. I did what I could to get as much of it as possible, which ended up with me on the ground. The angle was also a really fun thing to play with. This ridge slopes up from right to left, so every picture I took felt oddly unbalanced. On a whim, I decided to frame my picture with the bottom lined up with the ground, regardless of slope. I was surprised by the result. It is almost impossible to tell that there is an angle, because it isn't very large, but the trees feel like they are reaching up to the sky. This reminded me a lot of the discussion in the Arnheim reading, and this intentional and slight unbalance gives this picture an interesting bit of character.

This is my man made object. I was walking through the 3rd floor of the UC and was struck by the almost symmetrical asymmetry. That seems like an odd phrase, but I am reffering to how both sides of the hallway have distinct, repeating patterns that are matched to each other by the dark tiles across the width of the hallway, but they have such completely different textures. The sconce lights really add to this effect, with their soft semicircles of light on the ceiling in direct contrast to the sharp angles of the wooden doors and window frames on the other side. This specific picture is not perfectly lined up, it is slightly skewed, but I liked it because as I was taking it, a person came up the back stairs and started walking towards me. Her dark form at that distance doesn't have any real detail, but seems to help balance the color. The right side has a bunch of medium gray and black features, while the left is all white and light, and as she is walking to the left side of the hall, she helps to even out the difference.