Another Week has passed…

I’m very proud of myself because I got a quick start on all of the assignments this week so I wasn’t rushing to get everything done by midnight tonight!  I will say, Week 3 has been my favorite week so far just because of the photography aspect.  I love taking pictures and I enjoyed many of the assignments we had to do!

The first assignment I conquered this week was to read all the articles about noir photography and the elements in which to look for.  I’m not a big reader, but I did read each one all the way through and made sure I understood what to look for before I moved on to the next one! I wrote about my reflections from the readings and my experience with photography (Worth 1,000 Words), and was pleasantly surprised with my photography work when I went back searching for pictures that I had taken.  Like I said before, I love taking pictures so this week was definitely the most interesting.

The next assignment for the week was to watch the Killer’s Kiss and one other film (I chose The Hitch-Hiker) and to reflect on the cinematography in each film.  I wasn’t too interested in the first film but I was highly intrigued by The Hitch-Hiker.  I like a good suspenseful film and that’s exactly what The Hitch-Hiker was.  While watching the films we were to take some still-shots that we thought showed the elements of noir which were listed in the photo safari assignment.  It was cool to see how different the films were in their way of expressing noir but, nevertheless, both did it justice.

The photo safari was, by far, my favorite assignment this week.  I had so much fun going around and snapping photos that I thought depicted what noir was about.  It was a very cold evening when I chose to do this safari and I couldn’t feel my hands for about 3 hours after I got home, but I got some really good shots and it was a very fun experience! I did take all of the photos with my iPhone so I think it would be an even greater experience if I took my good camera out and snapped some pictures.  I hope we do more of these photo safaris in the future of this course!!!

As always, the daily creates were a nice way of getting me involved when I wasn’t exactly doing the other assignments of the class for this week. I really had a ball making my own 2048 and then playing my custom game for maybe about an hour. It’s just such a great game to look at (because they’re Grey’s Anatomy characters and I’m obsessed with that show).

I will tell you, I liked the visual assignments MUCH more than the writing assignments we did last week.  I’m much more interested in taking or creating pictures than I am in writing stories.  The first visual assignment I chose was the Shakespearean LOLcat (worth 2.5 stars). I chose that assignment because I think cats are very cute and I like making pictures that make people LOL.  I’m not very familiar with photoshop or gimp so this assignment was a bit hard for me but I finally figured it out (yay!). I chose to Pick a Bad Photo for my next visual assignment.  This assignment was worth 2 stars and I used those 2 stars towards my 5 point total focused around my character for the week.  I found the photo on the internet and used a photo editing website to insert the helvetica font.  I’m glad I chose this one to be focused on my character because it was hard for me to think of a picture that I could use as a background that would describe my character.  I finally found the perfect one and the result is linked with the name of the assignment above!  The other 3 stars that were dedicated to my character was the What’s in Your Bag assignment.  This one was a fun one to do because I got to play around with some cool stuff which you can see if you click on the link of the name of the assignment.  No one was hurt in the taking of the picture so there is no need to worry!  That assignment accurately describes my character and what he does for a living.  After giving many hints about what kind of business Lawrence is in, I’m interested to see if anyone has figured it out yet. The final visual assignment I chose for the week was the 10-Step Photo Challenge worth 3 stars.  It was interesting to me how many different perspectives I could get just from 10 steps in my backyard.  It made me look at things differently and made me TRY to find different perspectives to use because 10 steps with the same 10 pictures? Well that’s pretty boring.

Organizing my blog was actually the first thing I did this week.  It wasn’t hard and I’m glad that it’s organized now because I can find things much easier than before.  I also like that everything is listed on the side of my blog so I can just click on the link and it’ll take me right to the page where everything I wanted to see is listed.  I also changed the background of my blog from grass to clouds…clouds give me a happy feeling (more so than grass) so I think I’ll stick with the clouds (for now, at least).

Those are my adventures for Week 3!  I’ve said this many times this week in multiple of my posts, but I really hope we do more with photography this semester.  I loved this week so much and I’d love to do something like this again!  I’m beginning to learn so much more about noir and I am excited to see what’s to come!

Week 3 of #noir106 is now complete

— Tiffany Yowell (@tyowell29) February 1, 2015