Aline Smithson

I found Smithson's work captivating. Her use of deep contrasts, shadows, and texture make her pictures aesthetically pleasing to stare at. I found the way she is able to interact with her subject, especially in her collection of children, is intense and satisfying. Her collection of children especially illustrated how effectively she interacts with her subjects. I loved how some of her pictures seemed to capture subtle nuances of everyday life and seemingly random moments in time, but seems to exercise a great deal of control over the composition. I enjoyed her clear distinctions between foreground and background, and loved how she forces them to interact with each other.

photographic lies

This project was interesting for me as it tested my limited capabilities in photoshop, which obviously still need a bit more work. It was satisfying for me to achieve an approach to this project, which opened up a lot of possibilities to experiment with. I thought that I should have expanded more with the idea of interaction with a space, and maybe taken shots over a longer period of time, to achieve more meaningful relationships with the space at hand. I was satisfied by the spaces I chose to shoot, as I thought they gave an interesting dynamic of college life, and were relatively stimulating aesthetically.

cinco

leningradskoye optiko-mekhanicheskoye obedinyeniye

I like that the Lomo has a cultish phenomenon. Its die hard fans and followers have made the camera a part of how the look at the world around them. The spontaneous shooting that they perform to record random moments to look back on. It takes the predictability out of taking a picture and provides an random snapshot. Lomography illustrates an emphasis on recording a moment in time rather than composing a picture. The imprecise nature of the camera confines the photographer to simply let the picture occur naturally. I like how this opens up the possibilities to gain a perspective into a random moment without disturbing the environment in which it is occurring.

erik hansen

The fact that Hansen's pictures were achieved in a dark room and not with photoshop or digital manipulation is remarkable. The ambient lighting that he is able to create gives it a quality of another world. I found the rich blacks and pure whites that he uses and the range of grays in between satisfying to see. The fact that the pictures were black and white gave it a sense of realism, but at the same time they retained a sense of wonder and question. The pictures seemed heavily produced, as there was much intentional composition in the sets that he creates. Hansen's pictures, while visually stimulating and satisfying, didn't really hold my interest for very long. I didn't feel as if they were much more than an aesthetic thrill, and a demonstration of masterful printing technique.

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