I’m Finally Done!

Hello all! As of 2pm today, Tuesday Dec 17th, I am done with this semester. May the grades roll in. Overall I think this semester went pretty well, and there was only the one class that I completed loathed (digital media). But I will take the positive outlook and say that I am so glad that there are people in the world who love doing that sort of stuff, and that I discovered I was not one of them. I like editing and doing MINOR touch ups to my own photos, but that’s about the extent of how I want to use those skills I learned in this class. So until late January, I am home free in terms of school.

Things may get quieter on this blog for a couple of reasons. First being that my Indiegogo Campgain has met goal! Thanks to my wonderful family I was able to reach my $500 goal. The campgain will still run throug mid-January, per Indiegogo’s regulations. So feel free to stop by and check it out for a bit. With the campgain being succesfull, I will be creating my own website on zenfoilio.com. I am in the works of using the trial time to set it up and get it exactly where I want it, but I will let you know when it is up and running. This hosting site for photographers has a pre-made blogging platform on it. I plan to use it for the professional side of my business.

Now it comes to this blog. I don’t know exactly where I want to take this as I am taking most, if not all of my photography stuff over there. I think what I will do is keep this one active at least through my remaining 2 semester to post projects I am working on at school, while keeping the other one competely professional. Let me know in the comments below whwat you think of this plan.

And while you are at it feel free to check out Facebook Page, Twitter and Indiegogo Campaign for the latest updates of what I am doing with my photography!

Related articles

• Indiegogo Campaign (picturelinephotography.wordpress.com)

Class Update

Hello all!

So the semester is winding down (only one week to go before finals) and I though I would give you an overall update of what’s been going on.

In painting we have been working on our final two. The first is a 24x36in canvas and it could be whatever we wanted it to be. So I chose dancing (of course). It took me WEEKS to figure out what to paint. I probably went through 10(!) different sketches until finally my professor let me start working with my canvas. Here is the painting so far:

 

It’s an abstraction of a develope. It’s a high extended leg position that you develop (here’s your ooo moment) over a certain measure of beats. I still have a lot to work on. During critique the major issue was I need to be more loose and really let my paint brush dance across the canvas… We shall see how that goes.

Our second painting also could be whatever we wanted. In this past week, I’ve been working on a few sketches of it. Here are my two sketches:

 

The basic idea is dancers on a dance floor. The size of the canvas will be 36x48inchs! Crazy big but I think it will work well with this idea. The top sketch is the first one I painted. I just wanted to get my basic idea across. I did one other that I am not showing here that does not reach the boards of the paper (like the first one), but where the brushstrokes and colors are more defined, like the bottom one. Now my professor pulled me aside and said he really like the concept but wanted to show me how different the feel would be with clear boarders. The sketch became more than just the paint, and the experience of the paint. The layers of color became more defined and the boarders added more depth to the painting, which I enjoyed. This led me to my third and final sketch (the bottom image). I really do look forward to painting this next week.

In digital media we created a magazine of our artwork. We had to make a front cover, a back cover, and an interior. For the covers we had to use Illustrator.  We had to make the front and the back covers really pop, and show our use of Illustrator. They could not be basic. They also had to be cohesive with each other. For the interior we used InDesign. We came up with our own artist statements and added photographs of our work thus far. I used a lot of my photography, and a few pieces from my casting and painting class. This has been my favorite project thus far. Unfortunately I do not have any picutres of it. We also just completed our animation project, which I disliked even more than our photoshop projects. We are currently working on our websites using Dreamweaver. I’m not in love with this project either, but such is life.

In photography, I have been focusing my efforts on ballroom dancing. I photographed our comepition, DCDI, on a 3200 speed roll. Here are a few pictures from that:

 

As you maybe able to tell, this film has a lot more grain to it, which gives it an almost darker quality to the prints. I really like this feel and I think I’m going to use this speed film for all competitions from here on out. It also allows to shoot in lower light situations which is great for competitions.

I have also focused on getting some of the members of my club to let me take pictures of their practice and classes. I am still working on printing those, but I hope to have more completed next week.

That’s all I have for today! Until next time, check out my facebook page and indiegogo campaign to see more of my work and to learn about what I am currently working on!

 

Indiegogo Campaign

As  you may or may not have noticed, I now have a new page to go see on this blog entitled Indiegogo Campaign. It will take you to a page that briefly tells you what I am doing and why. In this post I am looking to go more indepth of why I started this campgain, and why it means so much to me.

As you know if you have been following, art, specifically photography, is my first love and my life choice in terms of career. Over the past three years at Maryland, I have grown as a person and as an artist and have come to terms with what I want to do with my life. I have made up my mind that I want to be a photographer. It’s not an easy choice to make, in fact it is quite daunting. It’s a highly saturated field, with a huge failure rate, and sporadic income. Well doesn’t that sound like a bundle of joy. But working at my part time, secure job has made me realize that I don’t want to be stuck at a desk all day for the rest of my life. I would be miserable. So I made that leap. I promised myself that I want to be a full time photographer in the very near future.

Ok the hard part of deciding what I want to do with the rest of my life is over. Whew… Got that stuggle out of the way. But what’s this? A whole nother slew of struggles of how to get from Point A, “now I know what I want to do”, to Point B, “making the dream the reality.” That’s where this blog comes in. I decided that I wanted to get my art work out there and hopefully start a gathering of people, while also talking about my second love dance. It was in this almost half a year of blogging (gosh has it really been that long?) that I realized that I wanted to mesh the two together. I have been dancing since I was little, and in college I fell in love with ballroom dancing. And you know what they say, stick to what you know. Well I know photography, and I know dance– so why not tailor my portfolio to dancing.

That makes it one step closer to getting to Point B. In the latter half of this semester, I have been using my photography class to just sit down and force myself to just take ballroom photos. And guess what, my photographs have turned out better because of two reasons. The first being is that I understand my subjects. I understand how their bodies move. And I have been developing my skills to understanding how and when I should snap that photo. The second reason being is that I actually enjoy taking these photos. It does show in your work when you truly love what you are doing. There is a certain care and love that comes out in those photographs. I do not feel like this is work when go into these photo shoots, because it’s fun. I am not constantly check to see how my shots are left in my roll of film. In fact, half the time I don’t realize that I only have one shot left and am completely surprised when my camera starts rewinding the film back into the canister.

I have also started a facebook page, which I will link to below, to further showcase my photography. In the past 2 weeks that it has been up, I have gained 85 “likes,” which is amazing! I am truly pleased with the outcome so far! I have also been connecting with the local ballroom community, and I hope to have a few events lined up in the future. I have also been in contact with the school’s Student Start Up Incubator, Startup Shell, to gain business advice and support for the next year I will be attending school. All of these things above are what I have done to get be to my ultimate goal of Point B.

Now I am in need of some help. As you know, I am a college student, which means I have a limited access of funds. I work part time, but it is usually only enough to get me food, gas, and  supplies during the school semester. Right now, to grow my business even further, I want to start a full fledge website for my photography. I want to be able to professionally showcase my art, as well as provide client access for prints. Unfortunately I do not have the funds to create one myself. This is where you, my readers and followers, come into play.

I have started up an Indiegogo Campaign for my website (link below). I am asking for $500 dollars to set up my website. The cost includes webhosting the main page with wordpress.org, and the webhosting through zenfolio for the photography portion of the website. I am currently at 20% of my total goal. If you can, I would greatly apprciate any support you can offer. Whether it be donating to the campaign, or sharing the campaign with your friends and family. This would mean so much to me. Thank you so much in advanced and for all the support you have given me thus far.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and a safe holiday!

LINKS:

FACEBOOK PAGE

INDIEGOGO CAMPAIGN

Major Class Update!

Gah sometimes the time gets away from me and I completely forget to post. This is one of those times. So I have a couple updates about the classes. The first painting in completed, yay! Here is a quick look at it.

I offically turn it in along with painting number two next week on the 24th for our midterm. Let me know what you think about it in the comments below!

The second painting that I mentioned is a series of four smaller paintings done on a 24×24 canvas, each image being 12×12. Here we are learning four different techinques, overpaint/underpaint, wet in wet, glazing, and impasto. The first techinque, overpaint/underpaint, is exactly what it sounds like, layers of paint overlaping each other to form the final design. Think impressionist. The second, wet in wet, involves adding paint on top of paint and smoothing the colors together to great a more blurry line of transitions between colors. Glazing, the third techinque, involves adding a thick, white medium to the canvas, and adding very light layers of pure colors and shades (adding black) to it. This gives you the purest and brightest colors out of all of the techinques. Also note, we do NOT add any tints, or adding white to our colors, in glazing. We only go down the color scale. Impasto is the last techinque we are applying to our canvas. This also involves adding medium to our canvas, but instead of trying to acheive really rich and vibrant hues, we are trying to ad visable, touchable texture to the piece. We are trying to build up the surface of the canvas to really make certain objects pop of the canvas.

So far I have only  managed to finish my overpaint/underpaint. I think I am almost done with my wet in wet, but I have not touched the other two. I have brought my canvas home with me to work on the wet in wet so that I can focus competely on the other two techinques on Tuesday in class. Here is what I have so far.

Although I haven’t been able to print much in photog, I have been able to get one picture competely finished and I have taken about 4 rolls now on film. It is from our Vantage Point roll. In this roll, we were suppose to take 4 objects and take 10 images of 3 of the objects, and 6 of the last (on a 36 count roll). The ones my professor liked the most of were the pictures of my beat up practice shoe for dance.

It’s probably really hard to see in this quick snap shot of the photo, But I took this on a cloudy day, with probably a mid shutter speed (around 1/250 or 1/500 of a second) and a low depth of field (probably around 4.0 aperture). This caused the background to blur out a bit to make the shoe really pop. On the enlarger I used the fspot (aperture) 8, which is a middle range of light, for a total exposer of 3 seconds. I dodged, or waved a piece of cardboard around to block the light, the shoelace area in order for that information to come up. I did this instead of lowering the time or aperture anymore so because the rock and front part of the shoe looked perfectly exposed, while that one area looked a bit too dark. I might do one more print, and dodge that area for the entire 3 seconds.

Finally I have completed two projects for digital media. Below is an image  from the first project. In this project we had to take 15 items, scan them, and then use them in compositions. Plot twist, we could not make it look like a cut and paste image. We had to use the objects to create a whole new environment. This was incredibly hard for me to do, but I ended up with the three compositions. This class is truly pushing my creativity. The image below used bobby pins, rhinestones, a sheet, a lock, and sweater to create a stormy sea setting.

Let me know what you think of my work in the comments below, or feel free to link me to some of your work. With my club’s competition coming up I will prepare a couple posts about ballroom and competing!

Related articles

• Painting Continued (picturelinephotography.wordpress.com)

First Week of Classes

Hello everyone!

I hope your Septembers are going well so far. I just wanted to give you a new update of what is going on in my artistic/school life. I have now had my first day of class of all of my classes as of 3pm today. I have to say, I am super excited for this semester. All of my studio classes, though seem challenging, seem to have a great energy and seem like they will push all of us to further find out voice through different medias. As suspected, I am currently most excited for my Photography and Digital Media class. The digital media class seems so fart to be the most challenging out of the studio classes, as this will be an entirely new experience, even more so than painting. Hopefully by next week I will have some works-in-progress to post here. I will definately have something from my painting class so get excited for that!

I will also be teaching a newbie ballroom class this year in my club. I will be teaching our freash crop of newcomers the Latin style of dance. They will be learning Cha-Cha, Rumba, Jive, and may be introduced to Samba by the end of the semester. If anything interesting pops up in that class I’ll write about it here as well.

Until then, have a good week!