Journal 1:9/15

While I was out covering a story at The Jazz Loft in Stony Brook village, I noticed something amber colored projecting onto the building. When I turned around, I was faced with this beautiful sunset. I’d never seen something in person where the sky was so orange. So I snapped a few pictures for practice and posterity. 

Journal 2: 9/22

Working on one of my journalism stories, I started experimenting with different settings in Photoshop and these are some of the results when applied to photos taken of artwork at the Senegalese art exhibit at the Zuccaire art gallery.

Journal 3: 9/29

For the Camera assignment, once I got used to the settings, I started to play around with them using one of my extra photos. Here’s a before and after.

Journal 4 :10/17

Today in class, we messed around with editing images in RAW by altering the metadata in TextEditor. Here are my results:

Journal 5: 10/22

This week, we were learning how to do double exposure edits with photographs but I didn’t have ones on a white background so while the photographs that were used aren’t mine, the work is.

Journal 6: 10/29

I was going through the old photos I have on my SD card and seeing if I could use the new stuff I learned to edit them better. Here are some results:

Journal 7: 11/11

Discursive prompt: A major improvement that digital media has brought to everyday life is the ease and ability to capture almost any moment. One instance in history that we see this is the Zapruder film. Shot on a Bell & Howell hand-held 8mm camera, a man named Abraham Zapruder used this digital device to capture the assassination of John F. Kennedy in vivid detail. While not particularly a positive event, the historical significance of the film is quite substantial and would’ve been impossible to relay in the same detail that a film camera would. It also creates this irrefutable record of the event as it occurred, dispelling any rumors that might’ve arisen.

The negative of this ability though, would be the lack of privacy. Now that everyone has phones that can take video and pictures at a moment’s notice, everyone’s sphere of privacy has shrunk majorly. But if we were to look at this from a historian’s perspective, the benefit of having this massive digital archive of human life across time is an educational necessity for understanding trends and analyzing society.

Journal 8: 11/18

Research and context: My final project Sentimental Objects is a narrative series of portrait shots of objects paired with their owners and a story about the significance of the objects. The format is isolated stories (or vignettes) pertinent to each object with a historical lens. The idea first came to me when I stumbled across this project called Worn Stories by Emily Spivack, who continues the theme in T Magazine column called “The Story of a Thing“. Her website delves into an object by having the owner write up the backstory on how they got it and what it means to them. My project is similar in this regards, but different in that my subjects are more localized to Stony Brook University. The message behind the project is to show the viewers that everything has a story and that a shirt can be more than just a shirt. In this modern age where identity is something that is constantly being argued over, what better way to show that we’re all human than by relaying stories about personal experiences?

 

Journal 9: 11/25

Three artists:

1. Emily Spivack: While she may not be a photographer, her art lies more in compiling the history of the objects and the written word itself. In her monthly column for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, “The Story of a Thing,” she interviews cultural figures about objects in their homes that provide insight into their interests and quirks. Her recent work follows in this theme, but instead applies it to a specific geographic location, i.e. New York. Worn in New York uses an amalgam of different articles of clothing to examine different perspectives of what New York is like for its residents. Her photographic process is simple studio portraits of the objects themselves. What inspires me about her work is the fact that she can make an ordinary person with an ordinary object representative of a larger theme and in a way that anyone would want to learn more. 2. Brandon Stanton: He’s the mind behind “Humans of New York” and it originally started as a project to get 10,000 portraits of New Yorkers and create a digital archive. Instead, it grew into a photo-historical archive of people across the world and a small piece of their lives. Before becoming a full-time photographer, he worked as a bond trader in Chicago and took photos on the weekend as a hobby. The style is a photo book of portraits, accompanied by short testimonies from the subjects about an important issue for them. Why it inspired me is similar to why the first artist inspired me. I love to learn about the stories of everyday people and to see what they’ve had to endure in order to get to where they are today.3. Christopher Bethell: He’s a British photographer who works primarily with portraiture but focuses more on the meanings behind his photos. One series he did, titled “Home Coming“, he followed around writers as they traversed their hometowns and relayed stories about their childhood. That’s what I’m really trying to get at here, the story beneath the photo.