Inland Northwest Naturescape - A Video

I live in the Inland Northwest and am blessed to be surrounded by nature.  There are several rivers within 120 mile radius that are overflowing with raging waters from spring runoff.  One such river in Washtucna, Washington bears a beautiful 200' waterfall.  Within our community of Spokane, Washington we have a gorgeous Spokane River running through downtown.

This video was made for an assignment in my photographic design course to help us learn more about a place that was important to us.  It was a great experience to see our community and recognize the beauty surrounding us.  I chose "naturescape" as my theme for this.  I love to walk out the door and see mountains to the north, find the rivers all around us, trees that surround our homes, and deer walking through neighborhoods.  My home is a gorgeous place indeed.

Please enjoy a little taste of what eastern Washington has to offer.

Digital Composite

During my first quarter of photography classes we learned how to do digital composites.  This quarter we are also doing them in our photographic design class.  I’m getting more comfortable with doing these.  While I don’t intend on doing a lot of digital composites they can be fun, and I can see how I would utilize this skill for doing the digital scrapbooking that I would like to do.

For this class we were instructed to choose one from four different artists and their movements to emulate for this project.  Our group chose Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, a film noir style painting created in 1942.  To accomplish this project we needed to photograph each person in our group of five separately, shoot a background, and other supporting objects/subjects, to composite into our final pieces.  Each person had to create their own individual composite plus we had to create one group composite. 

 After researching film noir we decided that our characters needed a story that would all tie together in the final composite.  This storyline was essentially that some characters were married and that they were all cheating on one another, and in the end one of the characters would have died, but no one would be able to tell “who done it” because every one of us could have been guilty.

In my group individual composite (below) three of our characters walked up on two of the others who were married, but the two of them had been cheating on two of the other characters that had just walked up.

 

In our final group composite, one of our characters ends up dead.  Two of the women look smug, the other woman is sad because he died, and the last man is nonchalant.  Can you depict which of the characters has killed the man?

Diptychs

School this quarter has kept us hopping with all that we are learning.  One assignment that we completed in our Photographic Design course challenged me a bit, until I was able to wrap my mind around how things could connect.

Diptychs, two images that are placed together that can show opposition or contrasts, or two objects that may not make a lot of sense when displayed on their own, but when displayed together can make perfect sense.

I took the image of the columns outside the Old Masonic Temple in downtown Spokane thinking they would make a great image, but it was more work for me to figure out what other image would display well with it.  The stage ropes were above and to the side of the stage at the old Masonic temple and looked so cool that I knew I had to do something with them.  I combined them with no space between the photographs because it make them form a triangle of sorts, but the lines from both images go well together.  I think it also speaks of organization and order.

Diptych of stage ropes and columns

The hallway picture held so much light in it that I thought it would combine well with the silhouette image of the girl with the darks and lights all coming together.  We often think of a hallway as darker, at least I do, so the image of the light and airy hallway was a perfect pairing against her silhouette was striking to me.

Diptych - girl's silhouette and light hallway

I now find myself looking for other subjects that can be placed together to give deeper meaning to their combined image.