Basics of Digital Photography

Assignment: In teams of two (assigned) document each other, capturing all use of technology throughout the course of one day and post photos to Flickr.



Since Ray and I were not able to schedule time to see the Floating Island, we went on a tour of Soho for an open gallery. Trying to find a gallery open on Monday is quite a task in itself. We originally planned to see the Revel Gallery on Spring St and Mercer St. They were unfortunately under some type of renovation. I knew that Spring St is covered in galleries so we just ventured West until we found something open.

We stumbled upon the Opera Gallery which had paintings, sculptures and collages on display. Some of the artists include Marc Chagall, Miro, Tobiasse, Linda Lekinss, Marcel Mouly, and Fernando Botero.

My favorite pieces were sculptures by Tolla Inbar. What makes her pieces so interesting to me is her use of materials to give the user the illusion that they are not what they seem. For example, Aspiration is made of bronze, but the rope looks to have the same texture as actual rope. Also, there is this illusion that the rope is just standing straight up on it's own defying gravity. Tolla's sculptures magical qualities intrigue me.

Taking photos of technology wasn't very difficult. We did not want to repeat taking photos of each other on the cell phone or taking photos. You just need to keep an open eye out for every little thing. The best find was definitely the copier machine on the sidewalk!

I did very little editing to the photos. For all photos, in Photoshop I applied an "Auto Level" to fix any slight white balance issue and resized to 640x480. Then for each individual shot I did some slight modifications on saturation, hue, or curves depending on what the photo needed.

Finally, we pasted our photos onto a joint Flickr account.

Make a page using CSS

Assignment: Modify at least one of the CSS for your journal or portfolio site.

First, I sketched out my idea in Photoshop. After several iterations, I came up with this:



Of the designs that I came up with, this one was going to have the least amount of problems since I wanted my page to expand and contract depending on the users screen dimensions.

From there, I chopped up the images to be used in a table. I created the table and put the page together using Dreamweaver. As a finishing touch, I used a style sheet to determine the font and the color of the fonts for the body text. The style sheet, called style_sheet.css looks like this:

body {
margin-left: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 25px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
}

a {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 25px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #00573C;
text-decoration: none;
}

The style sheet controls the body text and the text links.

The final page looks like this!

The American Folk Art Museum's "Self & Subject"

Assignment: Go to The American Folk Art Museum's "Self & Subject" Show and using a blogging tool of your choosing, write and post a response to the exhibit.



Let me just start off by saying that The American Folk Art Museum and self portraits do not appeal to me. Most of the art work looks like the junk I see at garage sales or the discount bin in Wal-Mart. This exhibit did not change my mind on this.

It was interesting though to see the various interpretations of what a portrait looks like. Usually portraits are paintings, but in this exhibit there were sculptures, collages, architecture, embroidery and the usual paintings. Here are a few that I found particularly interesting:

William Edmonson’s sculpture was interesting because I thought it looked a bit Egyptian with the pyramid-like ends and what looks like a snake in front. It wouldn’t make sense to have an Egyptian sculpture in an American folk art museum. I guess he was influenced by it even though that wasn’t in the description.



Mose Tolliver’s self-portraits were great because they reminded me of Leonardo daVinci’s sketches of ugly people, but uglier. All the people are patch worked and monster-esque.



Harry Lieberman’s painting of The Most Orthodox Rabbi was really amusing to me because I lived in Hasidic Williamsburg for a few years and my Jewish friends always said that the Orthodox Jews would always give them evil looks.

Ray Materson's embroidered baseball cards of Ted Williams, Joe Dimaggio and Hideki Matsui were nicely done.

A.G. Rizzoli’s Mother Symbolically Recaptured/The Kathedral seemed to be stretching the definition of portrait, but it was excellent draftsman work.

Overall though, I don’t see how most of the works in the museum were any better than this work of art that I saw outside of the museum: