Process

Original experimentation

Ice

Over lotion

While melting

My Process

When we started this project, I was excited at the possibility of pushing the boundaries and exploring new techniques of photography and photo manipulation. This enthusiasm existed through our preliminary shoot. I had an excuse to continue to experiment with some different processes that I had learned about before, namely longer exposures paired with zooming the camera in or out and/ or moving it. Since double exposures are not possible on a digital camera, it was the closest thing to that effect. I loved some of the shots that I got and I thought that they really expanded my view of what the camera lens was capable of. But then I came to class.

Sitting in class, watching as each person presented what they had done for an initial experiment made me a little disappointed, especially after reading the camera hack website and looking into artists for posts. It struck me that while we may be doing new and creative things for ourselves, they were not original. Each idea had been done before, in a more extensive and interesting experiment. As the project continued, I found this thought hindering my ability to work. I would come up with what I thought was an interesting idea, only to shoot it down in disgust. Everything has been done! I would go through the motions of a shoot, do the normal manipulations (plastic bag over the lens, lotion on the lens, shooting through various jars and cups, etc.) and be completely unsatisfied with my work.

I wanted to do something different from the ideas presented and reviewed in class. I wanted to shoot something recognizable, something crisp and clear that implicated deeper meaning through its structure and not its abstraction. With some of my experimentations, I created beautiful blurs of gray, black and white; some of my photos looked like paintings. They are fantastic photos and they force the viewer to consider the intricacies within different tonal ranges. It’s been done. The process was very similar to that of several other people and made me want to push past it to a new area.

When we were going through the different props and materials that were open to our use, I came across a mirror. When I started thinking about how I could use it, I thought of windows and then ice. Each material is reflective, throwing light and shapes in an interesting manner. A mirror shows what is in front of it, but can be fogged by different temperature materials. The same with glass, particularly that of my lens; it was fine in most cases, but occasionally got too cloudy for me to see through. The ice, however, was what I was interested it.

Ice is temporary. It melts and flows into water and away. It was unlike the other two crucial materials used in this shoot. This uniform character of the chunks of ice I was shooting interested me, as well as the fact that the ice kept melting, creating interesting patterns on the mirror surface. The height was reflected and the chunk looked twice as tall, with an interesting distortion at the base where the water had melted and made a puddle on the glass. This intersection was interesting to me. I had two different blocks of ice, one a reflection and one in reality, which were separated by a puddle of water that created a kind of barrier between reality and reflection.

I think it was the idea and concept of reality vs. reflection that interested me. The ever changing nature of ice and the clear, seeing quality of the materials I used are what made the shoot interesting. If I had to do something differently, however, I would procure a larger mirror and a flat table. One problem I had was with the ice sliding off the edge or leaking through the cracks between the mirrors I used. Also, I noticed that it makes a huge difference in what is hanging above the mirror. It would be cool to mess with that and see what impact it would have on the quality of light in the photo.

This class is about process. It is about the journey of the artist as we try to find some semblance of order and meaning and creation in the world. We document the trail of thoughts that we have in order to try to better understand the creative process we follow. Everything is about process, about the ideas we have and strive to convey.