And photography week begins!
I am so excited to start this week. I’ve always considered myself as an amateur photographer. I love taking pictures and I’ve picked some stuff up from other people I’ve met but I’m definitely not my cousin (he’s a pro, you should check out his page because it’s amazing) and I’ve never really pursued any sort of more formal training. Right now, I mostly take a ton of pictures at track meets. Although, so far this season I’ve been taking mostly video footage in hopes of putting together a video for our team at the end of the year. But I haven’t really had the chance to whip out my camera outside of track meets until I started taking this class. Now, I’ve had more opportunities to be creative with photography because of the Daily Creates (as you can tell from the pictures I’ve already uploaded to my flickr account). My general approach to taking pictures is honestly just to take them from as many angles as possible, basically what looks interesting from my perspective and then weed through and find what I really love. There are definitely times where I have tried to capture a particular feeling with my photographs. Especially at track meets where there is so much raw emotion- you see people giving up, you see people with complete determination, you see moments of pure joy when people finally achieve a personal best. I think I have been fairly successful in doing capturing those emotions.
Glenn Taylor happily running away from the entire field to get a first place seed in the 100m finals at the 2014 outdoor capital athletic conference championship.
Emily Derse determined to get a spot in the 200m finals at the 2014 outdoor capital athletic conference championship.
I’m hoping to improve my photography skills some this week by really focusing on the shapes within the photograph. Particularly this week, I think I can accomplish this by manipulating the use of shadows which is really important in noir. I’m also going to work on not taking quite as many pictures but rather focusing in on what it is I really am interested in capturing. I can also work on this by taking time in the set-up of the photograph. I’m also hoping to take some time to get to know my camera better and really utilize all of it’s features.
In doing the readings on how to improve my photography, I found it really interesting that the Migrant Mother appeared so frequently. When I wrote my first post on noir photography, I was actually considering looking into other photography by the same artist but I wasn’t sure if it had enough stylistic elements to be categorized as noir. Looking through some of Dorothea Lange’s other works I definitely think her photography fits in with noir.
