Week 4: Adobe LR/PS, Portraits, and Aplhabets... Oh My!

Nicola Kuperus

Today in class we went over art opportunities, basic Lightroom editting, and basic photoshop layers. If you are behind on blogposts, please get these up to date no later than this weekend. 

Assignment for this week: "Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others"

1. I would like you to go through the portraits that we shot in class the other day, and chose 5 of your favorite images. 1 portrait must be a self-portrait. And 1 portrait must be of someone else. The remaining 3 are your choice, (Self or Other). You will take these 5 images and process them in Lightroom:
• If you do not feel confident about the portraits you have taken, please RESHOOT. You should feel good about your work. Shoot until you do. 

• In Lightroom: Make sure to do your White Balance, color corrections, exposure, contrast, and any cropping. And then EXPORT the images as jpegs. 

• You will then post these 5 images to your blog prior to next class, 9/27. Post should be titled "Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others." The day of the class, please bring these images on a harddrive / thumbdrive to turn in, we will be projecting them for the critique. 

• Please label images in the following format: lastnamefirstname_portraits_001.jpg. 
• Ex: SmithKristina_portrait_001.jpg, SmithKristina_portrait_002.jpg, etc. 

Monica Ruzansky, Dicen Que

2. I would like you to continue shooting for the Alphabet assignment. 

• You will photograph a minimum of two complete sets of the alphabet. 

• (Remember, there are 26 letters in the alphabet. 1 image for each letter. Each complete set must be different, So at least 52 images total.)   

• You will process one alphabet set in color and one in black and white. The letters should be made from your image composition, and not from shooting actual letters or typefaces that you may find on signs! Two sets are due, the friday after next, on October 4. We will process these in class on Friday, September 27, so please have something to work with. And the final image will be posted to your blog as one final image. 
• See the example below:

                                           

Jen Davis

Jen Davis

Jen Davis is a photographer based out of Brooklyn, NY. She has been working on a series of Self-Portraits for the last 12 years dealing with issues of identity, beauty, and body image. Her images investigate both the physical and psychological idea of relationships and also explore the male as subject. She received her BA from Columbia College Chicago in 2002 and her MFA from Yale University in 2008. 

What I find to be the most interesting aspect in her series of Self-Portraits, is her ability to convey a multitude of emotions and personal experiences before the camera. At times, she looks afraid and vulnerable, and yet in other photographs, she appears confident. Almost defiant. Her images give me a sense of her self-perception and also how others may perceive her. You can view more of her work here.

This is an example of how I would like the portrait photographer blog posts to be listed.

Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others

Emmit Gowin

Today, I will show you some great portraits and we'll get in groups and we'll start planning to photograph one another. Find five great portrait photographers online, tell me who took the pictures and why you like the images, and add them to your blog before next class. Your goal is to make five great portraits of each person in your group, including yourself. The photograph needs to be strong compositionally, be interesting to look at, and should tell us something about the person being photographed. A pretty tall order, sounds a lot like a collaboration between the subject and the photographer to me...


Make sure you bring your pictures with you to next class, on your hard drive. 
ALL OF THEM. 

The following images were made by Edward Curtis, he is the fellow on the right with the fine hat and goatee. He started this project to record the way of life of the North American Indian in 1907, and made more than 40,000 images of them. You can see many of them at the Library of Congress.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=edward%20curtis