Project 2 Description

Project Name: Faces/ Don’t forget the Lights

Project Description/ Conceptual Concerns:
Two ideas that I have though of while thinking about this project is that I was driving around the other night going to get food at 1:00am and I noticed on Ventura boulevard that there where a bunch of stores that had gone out of business but yet even though there was nothing in the store they still kept the lights on inside them. It made me think why the lights are on in a store that has nothing in it. Stores that keep their lights on usually have stuff in them so that they leave the lights on so if someone breaks into their store people can see them. But these lonely out of use stores just seemed so sad with their lights on and that it’s almost as if they were longing, begging to be become useful again. If I end up using this project idea then I would just take pictures of these stores that are on Ventura Boulevard. The only problem that I might run into is the fact that so far I have only seen two stores so I would have to go drive and find more stores that kept their lights on at night that had nothing in them. I have seen a many stores that are out of business but they do not keep their lights on at night. The other problem that I might run into is the read of the pictures; I’m not sure how they will read to the view when shown. The second idea that I have is that this is more of a life on going work that I have always thought it would be an interesting thing to try to take pictures of people in my life that I would consider friends, at are just more then an aquatinted, someone that I could actually have a conversation with. So take these pictures all in a similar fashion so that they all tie in together. There will be no back ground to give emphases to the person and not the environment that is around them. There will be more about how I will shoot the project in the technical part of the write up. I know that they type of project has been done before, but I want to try it as a way of document people for my own memory because the mind forgets and photos are a way of helping memories just faces can bring back memories of entire events, that’s what the documentation is going to try and see if it will work out.

Technical Skills:
For the first part the skills that I want to try using is taking an HDR because these pictures will be taken at night so I want to see if I can get any more information out of the picture by taking an HDR. I’ve never really taken an HDR photo so I will have to do some reading about that so I can have a proper looking photo. And then there is always the skill of white balancing the picture so it looks right. For the second idea that I have I would need to get a back drop and learn how to use my flashes that I have better and try to do some what of a studio type lighting set up and learn how to do lighting for these shoots. I figure that would take a great amount of time to figure out how to light things correctly because every time that I have tried to use the flashes in the past it has just given me a headache. I am going to see if I can get my prints to be sharper also when I print them off because they still are not as sharp as I would like them, I learned a good amount about this on the last project but I am going to continue doing this some more to see if I can get the results that I want.

Formal Guidelines:
For the first project with the buildings I would hope to have at least 5- 7 buildings that I could find and there would be one picture for each building. The prints themselves would be about 10x15 prints. The second one idea would be printed 10-12 prints of people. The size of the prints I am thinking that I want to print them out about the size of old albums so around 12x12 prints.

Artist references:
I’m not really sure of any artist that I could use to reference at this time, but I am going to look some up and see if I can find anything.

Readings:
I think that there is going to be a lot of reading for references to research information that will be looking up to figure out how to do HDRs and for the lighting so that I can the images that I want. I was told that there is a blog called strobist that has a lot of information about lighting that I should look up and that it would be very helpful for the information that I am looking for.

Grade:
The project should be graded on if the goals that were set where meet, and that a higher grade should be given if the project meet and surpasses the goals that where set technically and conceptually.

Goals List:
The goals are the same as the last project and that is just to have better printed images and have a better white balance. I would also like to learn more about lighting techniques so that it could help me in the long run.