Friday, 30 October 2009
Monday, 26 October 2009
Friday, 23 October 2009
Monday, 5 October 2009
Essay question
I have not completed enough research on my essay writing task to create a question, however the topics I intend on exploring are: the inevitability of death in photographs and how post-mortem photography was and is viewed. Other topics include the re-touching of imagery in society and whether plastic surgery is just as acceptable as removing blemishes in Photoshop.
Self Portrait idea
These are a few ideas I've put together for my portrait, although the picture is landscape, the ideas can be transfered to portrait. I'm expressing here the idea of how much a picture can say about someone, does a picture have the potential to reveal someone's entire life? I realised that when doing a self-portrait, it's inevitable that you're conveying who you believe you are at that certain time of your life. So I began by placing an image of myself in the middle, this image is sort of how I believe I look most of the time, if I was to choose clothes to represent how I dressed at this age it would be them. Then to the left I would express how I lived using existing photos of myself since I was a baby. Then to the right of me, I would express how I believed the rest of my life would unfold, what job I would get etc. The long vertical black gap along the right represents death, at this point of my life, death is one thing I can't think of, I couldn't guess how I might die, this might change as I get older but at the moment I cannot portray this in my portrait.
Maya Dice Render
These are the dice that I've rendered using Alan's tutorials, I ran into several problems, perhaps the most annoying being forgetting to save regularly and finding that 'Maya has unexpectedly Quit' while approaching the end of the tutorial. After rendering my dice, a message came up at the bottom of Maya saying that the render camera was too close, however it did still render, but when saving, the resulting .TIFF file seemed to be corrupted according to Blogger and had to be converted to JPEG. The other problem was the unwanted creation of vertices but this was covered by Alan. I did however, get my plane to randomly rotate when re-selecting my camera, this was one problem that led to Maya unexpectedly quitting. Otherwise, the only other things that I did not understand were things like deleting alphas from photoshop and tweaking the light settings in Maya, but I suppose I will eventually understand these things as the course progresses and should just do as Alan's tutorials say at the moment.
Fourth Life Drawing
This is my fourth life drawing, after going over the rules that the teacher taught us for the third life drawing, I used these, and created a composition in the corner of the page, something that Godwin taught me to do before starting, and this did provide help towards my final piece. I began to understand the 'lines formula' a bit more and created lines in the places they were needed. This was a much more successful attempt and I was happy with the outcome as the limb proportions were correct through my eyes.
My Third Life Drawing
After my two failed attempts at getting the proportions correct, our teacher introduced us to a new way of looking at the subject. He taught us to only use lines and no ellipses, to calculate limb sizes. I was a bit wary of this at first and could not create the whole subject using a combination of different straight lines that linked different limbs to eachother, although some areas did add up, when everything came together it did not look how I intended it to at all.
Second Life Drawing
This was my second attempt at life drawing, as like before I managed to get the subject to fill the whole page but I still did not get the limbs the right size, however they were slowly getting there. Big problems with getting the size of the calves and thighs correct arose as I wasn't looking at the subject enough and used the wrong calculations.
First Life Drawing Picture
This is my first life drawing, immediately you can see how I got the proportions wrong between the limb sizes. I did however manage to fill the whole page, but the calculations I used to create the different limb sizes were all wrong.
Roland Barthes quote
In front of the photograph of my mother as a
child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder,
over a catastrophe which has already occurred.
Whether or not the subject is already dead, every
photograph is this catastrophe.”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
This quote reveals how a photograph of someone expresses the inevitability of their death. This analysis interests me as I began to think, is it possible to sum up one persons life in a photograph. So as a result you would hold their life in your hands and alleviate the shadow of death out the picture. I realise that as I will be creating a self-portrait it would be impossible to display my future life in the photograph. However, all I can really express anyway are the views of myself from birth to present. So, if I can do this, maybe it wouldn't be so inappropriate to conclude for myself what I believe my future life would be like. Now although this would be 'my life' from the eyes of me at '18', it would still be more informative than one picture.
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