Photography

I’m not a person to photograph a lot of things. I usually take photos of random and interesting things I see when I’m walking around. I rarely take photos of myself. I’ve probably taken four selfies in my lifetime. When I take photos, I usually like to focus on one particular things like something I find or a nice scenery. When it comes to capturing feelings and meanings in my photos, I tend to take pictures of some sort of calming scene. My twitter and Facebook pages both have the cover photo as the photo below.

I believe that photos can have elements of meaning embedded in them from the people that view them. I don’t really take photos for someone else to find meaning in them, but I usually take photos that have feelings and meaning for me or my friends. I like to capture moments that I can look back on and be happy about.

The readings on photography were very interesting. The Migrant Mother piece outlined how photos can convey emotions to the person that sees it and the person that took it. I liked how Dorothea Lange was determined to take photos even though the content was a bit jarring. She wanted to show certain scenes that weren’t usually seen. It shows how important it is to take photos of things you like but also to use photos to show what people don’t usually see. Justin Marrow’s piece on the rules of film noir and how to light it gave me a better perspective on noir filming and helped me in taking my noir safari pictures. Overall, the material that stood out the most to me was Jason Eskenazi’s video on Visual Storytelling. He says that “visual literacy is something that we are born with.” He talks about kids being able to decipher his photos but some of the older people he meets aren’t able to. My favorite quote that he says is “so much is what you leave out.” He means that photographs are meant to be interpreted and part of the fun of photos is having elements of mystery that compels people to think. I liked looking through the readings, but the video was the most influential to me.