End of Semester

I have truly enjoyed this semester with you all, despite Ike getting involved. I hope to see each of you around campus next semester. Keep me up to date with what is going on with you, and feel free to consult me about your future work - I would love to see where you go after this. Have a great holiday/break! Grades should be accessible soon. I am posting them now.

Happy Holidays

I hope you all have a nice Christmas and a Happy New Year. It's been a nice semester knowing everyone and I learned about how to use an enlarger, and the camera settings. This is my first semester at the University of Houston. The thing that made me upset during the semester was Hurricane Ike.

Good Luck

It was great meeting everybody! I haven't really been to college for 11 years!! I was surprised and pleased to meet so many down to earth and nice people - it wasn't what I was expecting! Anyway, hope everyone has a great holiday and I hope to see you in future classes - if not good luck with everything you choose to do in life. Wendy

Keith Carter at HCP Saturday!

Artist Talk and Book Signing with Keith Carter
Saturday December 6, 2008, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

http://hcponline.org/calendar.asp?show=640&calid=602

http://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/images.html

remaining lab hours!

Here is the schedule for the chemical lab for the last week of school:
Wed. Dec 3rd: 5pm-11pm
Thurs. Dec 4th: 5pm-11pm
Friday Dec 5th: CLOSED
Sat. Dec 6th: 10am-5pm (Dena Wallace)
Sun. Dec 7th: 10am-5pm (Candace)
Mon. Dec 8th: 5pm-11pm (Rowan Bigham)
Tues. Dec 9th: 5pm-11pm (Kelly Quarells)

Also, if you cannot be in the classroom at 10am on Monday, please email me asap so we can coordinate a time to meet up/for you to pick up work.

sladuncan@gmail.com

Sooo...

Anyone want to buy a whole pack of photo paper from me? I thought I would need it but meh. Er along with a couple of sheets from my old box. My starting price is $70 but I'll be willing to make a deal ;)

need my self portrait work??

Hi Shannon! I had left class today to get paper and just realized that you might have handed our self portraits back. Maybe not, I have no idea, but I want to use some of the photos for the final. So I was wondering if I could get the project back in order to mount the photos by Wednesday. Is there any chance of that? (please)

Good news...

The lab will be open ALL day and night - til 11 pm. :)

Final Lab Hours

Lab will be open tomorrow from 10 am til 5 pm.
I will be at school from 6:30 pm til 8:30 pm to allow you a little more work time.
We will use Monday as a workday, and you will have regular lab hours Monday and Tuesday evening.

Hope you all had a nice break and holiday. :)

Statement for self-portraits

Most of the photographs I took were taken utilizing motion, especially the 5 I chose for critique. I decided to capture motion in my pictures in order to give them abstraction. I decided to give them abstraction because I wanted them to be hard to read. I wanted them to be hard to read because I feel I am very hard to read myself. I usually find that most people can rarely tell when I'm happy or when I'm depressed. Most of the time I feel I just have no real readable expressions, in fact I find it EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to smile properly without forcing one. I usually have to laugh in order to naturally smile. Same goes for when I'm sad, I'm very well with masking my pain so most people can't tell when I'm honestly just chipper and in a very good mood or when I'm torn up inside and just "in a bad way". That being said in most of the pictures I don't have my face featured, and even in pictures where it is it's blocked one way or another.

The main series I focused on are 3 photographs of myself. 1 of me lying down amidst my collection of CDs and the other 2 of my arms holding up my favorite, most treasured, guitar. The photo of me with my CDs features my face however since I couldn't really use motion to create abstraction since I was lying down I simply used my hair to block my face from view. In a way I feel this one held some sub-conscious elements just taking it in briefly. The reason behind that is I also find it very hard to make direct eye contact with people let alone keeping it for more than a second or two. So perhaps that could also be another reason why I wanted to obscure my face. That being said, I'm lying around my CD collection because music is very much apart of my life, I'd say besides caffeine the only other thing flowing in my blood, is music. Also to be noted in the photograph I have the album "The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd featured above my head. I did that to illustrate a sort of light bulb type of image, like I'm enlightened. I say that because that is the one album that really made me become deeply interested in music in general. I find it to simply be a brilliant and beautiful piece as a whole. Plus it helps to both bring out my deepest thoughts and dreams but also bring me back down to Earth with its dreariness when I sit down to listen to the whole album all the way through. Anyways I'm rambling.

The other 2 photographs in the series I feel illustrate the strength and inspiration music brings me and the strength and inspiration I seem to find from within myself. During the process of this project I became extremely burnt out due to work loads and my personal life. However I think this piece is extremely powerful because of these circumstances. When taking these photos I was shaking my guitar extremely violently up and down in front of the camera, something that should have tired me out considerably since the guitar is actually quite heavy being essentially a big slab of mahogany wood. So in essence, no matter how dark and horrible my day may be or how worn out I feel, as long as I have the music flowing through me and I'm still able to lift up and play my guitar, I can see the day through. Also to be noted in all 3 photographs I also wanted to illustrate distance by not clearly showing "myself" in general. I usually feel at times I can be extremely distant, even with my best friends. It comes and goes but I always notice a distance when I interact with people in general at times.

The last 2 photographs are a bit more playful and not as deep per say as the main series. The first one was a bit of a fun one I devised. I rented this video game "Guitar Hero: World Tour", basically a music-based video game. In the game it has a create a character feature. So I used that to create sort of an ideal "Rockstar" version of me. I created abstraction in the photograph by taking the picture while I made the character rotate capturing some motion there and also from the fact I was photographing the TV screen so scan lines can be seen in the photograph creating another form of abstraction. Also I feel the idea in general of making an ideal version of myself is in a way an abstraction of its own. The last photograph was one of several different photographs of a series. This series was mainly me doing all sorts of crazy movements with my guitar. Like some photos in the series featured me doing "windmills" while I strummed my guitar, others pictures of me in the process of "smashing" my guitar against the floor (didn't go through with it of course lol), and the one I went with for the critique is one of me "shredding" along the neck of my guitar. I chose that one because this one held so much motion and abstraction in the photograph that I was pretty much unrecognizeable and the only thing in the photo that helped me remember what I was doing in it at the time was the way the neck of the guitar was positioned when the photograph was taken. So in short, although I may be a emotionally distant person I do have a very playful side still in me. And in a way that does make sense because this semester especially I've been a social butterfly, shaking off all my nerves and inhibitions. So in a way these photographs capture traits of who I've been and who I hope to be.

LAB HOURS SUNDAY

lab will be open from 10 am until 5 pm Sunday!

Sunday

Do we have a time for Sunday yet??

Mounting...

With mounting your prints:

You want to remove the white border around your prints if you will ONLY be mounting them. Otherwise you will have an unattractive white border around your print. This can be even more of an eyesore if the white print border is on top of off-white mounting board. You can cut down your print to desired size first, tack a corner of the mounting paper to a corner of the print, then cut down the excess mounting paper.

If you will be mounting AND MATTING your prints, the white border is not an issue. once you have matted the print, the photograph will show through the window, but the print border will be covered by the mat.

Question about mounting

My prints all have borders, where you are able to see the sprockets.

When we mount our photos, I was curious if I was supposed to trim off the white border of the photo print itself, or just leave it on when I mount it on the board.

Some have told me yes, and some no. I'm too scared too mount any photos until I know for sure. Hahha.

Thanks.

Portfolio

Camera Co-op sells a box for the 11 X 14 mounted prints. What did you want the prints turned into you in? You said something about store bought or handmade, but I'm not sure exactly what they are supposed to be in. Appartenly there is no folder type storage available just a box. Let me know. Thanks! Wendy

Angled Me

With my series of self-portraits I originally wanted to emulate Alexander Rodchenko’s style of using extreme angles. On a couple of the photos I believe I successfully achieved this, specifically on the one where I am looking at the rearview mirror of my car, the one that is angled from the ground at a seated me and the one where I am laying spread eagle on the grass. For the other two, though they aren’t necessarily using extreme angles, I do believe they are my favorite of the five. This is mainly because I was able to get very good exposures on both.
So because I focused more on experimenting on the style of extreme angles I wasn’t as focused on the emotional meaning behind every photo. But I purposefully didn’t smile in each photo because I hoped it would show the state of mind that I was in while working on the photos. To make a long story short this has been a long, confusing and stressful semester for me, with the workload of my classes, the aftermath of Mr. Hurricane Ike and recently the death of my grandfather and all that goes along with that. So I guess you could say my state of semi emotional numbness came out in the photos I took of myself.
Ultimately I was very happy with results of the prints I chose to develop. All but two of them, the rearview mirror and the one where I am seated, had good exposures. For those two I did 12 seconds of extra burning to parts of the prints in an attempt to bring out more detail. I think overall my favorite print is the one where I am wearing my throwback Astros hat, seated against a brick wall with my hands outstretched towards the camera. I specifically like this picture because I was attempting to achieve a decent depth of field shot to get a different perspective on extreme angles with the hands out of focus and me in focus.

Self Portrait Statement

Self Portraits express a variety of things to many different people, but if done right, you can send a message that everyone will get correct. Being fascinated and familiar with portraiture photography, I wanted to challenge myself and take it to the next level. I decided to do partially nude self portraits, and expose my love and how comfortable I am in my tattoo and body art.

Tattoo's and body art has definitely shaped who I am and what I've been through since my child hood. Tattoo's are a regular part of my mother's side of the family, and growing up with that side of the family, instead of with my father, I believe I am a better and more understanding person to all cultures. There is nothing better than expressing yourself through photographs, than body art, so naturally I combined the two and decided to focus on them for this assignment.

Growing up in poverty and confusion, I never knew my father and basically grew up thinking I was only Mexican. I wanted to use my standing back portrait to be placed in the middle to show this; which has my sugar skull day of the dead tattoo. My tattoo's represent the person I've become throughout life and who I want to be remembered as when I die and this is all that is left. I want to be remembered as a caring person who wasn't anything but open to everything and everyone.

This assignment was a little disappointing to me in the fact that I think I over excited myself. I was expecting self portraiture to be easy because I've done it using a DSLR and not a 35 mm camera. The results aren't exactly what I was expecting but it most certainly taught me many things and definitely opened me up to so many ideas and possibilities. Although these final prints aren't, in my mind, absolutely perfect I still really enjoy them and I am proud at myself for taking this approach. To me, they are beautiful and I enjoyed having this opportunity.

Self Portrait's Statement

"The Inner ME..."

Self portraits are either very simple or very complicated. Most traditional self portrait concentrates on the face, where a simple smile is displayed. However for my self portrait assignment in this class I choose to interpret myself through myself without displaying my face in any of my prints. I’m going to capture the inner me through my body language and old poetry I have written a while back. Each photograph will represent a single poem. The poem itself will play the memoir of each different photo or the other way around. It depends how the viewer chooses to view my work.

They way I plan to achieve this goal is through using transparencies that I have purchased and created in Photoshop on my own. These transparencies will contain the individual poems and a consisting display of calligraphically border.

I would like to speak a little of my choice of poetry fro this particular assignment. I choose these specific poems because they reflect on the me I keep hidden from the world around me. Anyone can tell I been through a tragedy, but what people don’t see is that my burns are nothing to me. I have came to accept what my God had brought upon me. However, a girl’s loss of her mother at young age is the real tragedy, at least in my heart that’s what I feel. Although I choose poems that display me as a lonely, depressed, and filled with sorrow person I still ended my intentional series with poem about faith. This poem is written in a way to encourage others or reminds others of the importance of faith, yet it still reflects on the person who wrote it, me, as someone who came through their hardships by holding tightly to this intangible belief called FAITH.

I believe I succeeded in achieving my goal for this project. Although I hate to do self portrait projects, I can honestly say I have enjoyed working on this project.

Self-Portrait Proposal

First of all, the photographs that I saw at the Museum of Fine Arts gave me many ideas of how to create a Self-Portrait of myself. The photographs that I will be taking for the Self-Portrait assignment are random photographs about me. As of now, I do not have a specific topic for my photographs. I was thinking of shooting rolls that are related to John Coplas which he made a self-portrait about his body parts, and also from Vaclav Chochola which he took his picture and inserted a transparency of him. For my first roll of film, I will take pictures of myself at the University of Houston in different poses. I was also thinking about taking three pictures of myself in a portrait as a mafia person with a bluish background and with the mafia logos on the four corners. And for the rest of the roll, I will be shooting it at the University of Houston. For the second roll, I will be taking pictures at my house also doing different poses. I will take the first ten pictures at the front of the house standing near the plants, all three vehicles, and standing next to my house. The next five pictures will be pictures inside my house. And for the last ones, I will be taking them in the backyard on top of the garage. I always wanted to take pictures of myself on top of the roof in different poses. Some of them will be about my daily activities that I do sometimes. For my third roll, I will be taking pictures of my body parts like Coplans, and the rest of them will be about many places so I can insert transparencies of myself in the picture itself.

Proposal for self portrait

Proposal for self portrait
Pochawan Calvert


This project is harder than I thought it would be. Finding our inner self, who we really are as a person is really difficult. Especially when you pretend to be someone you’re not. I’m always trying to please others, never myself. Our society is so critical; people will always judge you no matter who you are. I try to be the best person that I can possibly be, but I always feel it is never good enough. I have done a lot of things in the past that I am not proud of and I try to live my life positively, but life in general is just too hectic for me. Sometimes I just want to pack up my stuff and leave, but where do I go from here? I do have to admit, I have more good days than bad days. I am much happier now than I was ten years ago. Sometimes I feel like I am the luckiest person in the world. I must sound really crazy right now, but that’s who I really am. These are some of the feelings that I would like the viewer to see when they are looking at my self portrait. I would like to keep the images as simple as possible. I do not want a lot of distractions in the photograph. Most of the photograph will be shot in my home where I feel most comfortable being myself.