Week 8: Straight Photography

Week 8: In our Photography II Class, we are focusing on advancing our skills in articulating our ideas and visions into compelling and aesthetically pleasing photographs. This week, we have moved away from photos as art to move towards straight photography, the process of capturing reality as it is through the lens of a camera.The photos above are the selected pieces I have chosen to illustrate the work I have done this week for the class.

Craft: The Craft of this assignment is the following: Digital SLR Camera (Canon E05 Rebel T5i), a computer, Adobe Photoshop, and a printer. As this was mainly a concept-based assignment, the majority of the work was done with the camera with minimal post-processing done in Adobe Photoshop to accommodate over-exposure, color correction, and inverting the colors in some pieces for next week's assignment.

Composition: In this class, we were tasked with taking photographs in the manner of straight photography meaning the photo captures the subject in sharp focus and detail retaining the reality of which it was taken without alteration that would tend it towards picture-making or make it appear as if it was not a photograph such as the case with pictorialism. As such, post-processing was kept to a minimum to correct errors in the photograph such as color correction, over or under-exposure, and inverting colors of some of the photos for the assignment for next week. Following capturing the photos as RAW files, I made the corrections and saved them as jpegs, uploading them here. We were also required to print out several photos in 8x10 inch formats with a one-inch bleed or white margin.

Concept: In this project, we were tasked with creating photographs that would be as unaltered and as "straight" as possible. As the process we were tasked with learning was straight photography, this was the main concept. The few alterations we did to our photographs were to make them presentable and ready for what we'd use them for next week. As we were tasked with making an abstract photo as well, I chose to go into the woods near where I live and photograph into the sea of wintry trees to capture the texture of the forest.