The old work I have chosen to share with the class is a photograph from a body of work I did for the Conceptual Strategies class I took last term. Each morning immediately after waking, I photographed the first thing I saw upon opening my eyes, which is the clear view out the window in my room. I practiced this ritual for about a week and got many different atmospheric backgrounds. In conjunction with these, I scanned pages of my personal journal and used Photoshop to layer the pages on top of the windows. The images were based on phenomenology and my quest to reflect my human experience in nature and ritual. I then photographed out windows in interior spaces of complete darkness to instill the scared feelings and experience of being alone at night in an eerie space for my next body of work. All these were done digitally and I used a tripod. However, the editing I did was minimal due to my lack of knowledge in that area.
Therefore, I have some goals I wish to attain through this course. The first being the ability to manipulate photos in a unique way so that they do not end up looking like all other snapshots using digital cameras. I want the digital photograph to possess an essence of an unnatural but still realistic scene as opposed to evoking the exact perspective one would have using only the human eye. I believe that after learning about the excessive tools of Photoshop, I would be able to achieve this. An artist that I think accomplishes this is Gregory Crewdson because his images use lighting in a way that looks peculiar, especially in his Twilight series. On a more technical level, I would like to learn more about the settings and features on the camera I own as well as learn to print professionally from my computer.
