Io Palmer, Color Photography, and Downtown Grad Center

It's been a wild two weeks getting back in the swing of things here at school. From new professors to new expectations. Some evenings after coming home, I will have the sorest jaw and realize that I have been biting down hard all day without knowing it. I really love these classes though. There's so much confidence gained in struggling through.

This is the beginning of our first project in Photo 4. Learning how to push and pull color film (under expose and over expose film in the camera by changing the ISO settings). Thank God this is a group project class!

Instructions on how to do this assignment. It took five glorious hours to get er done. And I have new brain cells to prove it. :)

                     
   MPI : One of the few great shops left that develops slide film.

   

    Here is a photo of the slide film. It was so cool to see positive images in film strips. They looked like little gems.

                                        

                                     

                                                       Grad Center downtown Memphis

                               This work is done by Io Palmer. She came to Rust Hall to give a lecture Thursday evening of her life as an succeeding artist.  http://www.iopalmer.com/Bio.html Check out da link and get to know ha.

Grad Gallery

            Trolley Night Downtown (This is where students get a chance to come out and be cool... and look cool).

                                                               

                                     I stopped on my way home last night to start snap a few shots on Covington Pike road in Bartlett. I want to start doing transfers with color photographs, and I thought car lot shots at night might be an interesting combination with paint.

                                   

It's always good to try again.

I decided that I wasn't happy with my first attempt photographing Nick. So I implored a couple friends for help (Joni Miller, and D'Angelo Williams) and took the same lights, wrapped in white plastics bags, and tried again. This time I wanted him stationed in public places. And it worked better then I thought!
The light works better in a few of the last ones, but overall, I'm pretty darn ok with what I got this time round.


The best moment of this evening was when D'Angelo commented, "I feel like we're making a movie! I feel like we're in a movie!" He was so excited. I could't stop laughing when I saw this picture.

                                                              Lets not get too carried away here.

External Light Sources

So this project is due tuesday for studio lighting. It's the intro project that has once again not failed in freaking me out. I have never taken a full on digital course, and so suddenly having to use my digital camera for school is very scary! White balance, spot metering, ISO, Aperture, camera speed. . . sniff and then more? I loose it so quickly and forget what I am supposed to be looking for when doing projects like these.

These photos were taken by using a bright LED spotlight with a  plasic bag taped over the bulbs to diffuse the intensity and to not create that flashlight look.

Besides cropping, we are not allowed to tamper with the pictures.

The model is a comrade in arms, as is the holder of the lights. Thanks Nick and Crystal!

A friend sent me a link to an artist by the name of Matthew Albanese showing his incredible creations called "Strange Worlds".  his short little interview he said:

“I have been very discouraged many times building these. It can be very frustrating,” Matthew says. “But I found that making mistakes was the best thing for the work because I was able to discover methods and strategies to build future landscapes.”

I think that this is the quote of the week for me. :) Not that it really applies to what I took tonight, but it applies to the fact that most of the time I am working, I am making mistakes. Every now and then I hit on something good. But that is few and far between.

Some are a touch blurry which does urk me. This is due to manual focusing, a cheap camera, and slow shutter speed.