Posts Tagged ‘VisualAssignments,’

 

My Day in Pictures

Saturday, June 9th, 2012
What Is This?
Visual Assignment 107 – Common Everyday Object

I admit, I am not one of those people who wake up easily. It usually takes me a while to focus and at first my surroundings might seem strange and unfamiliar to me. Is it a wonder, then, that the object you see in the picture above appeared to me exactly as you see it? It is one of the first things I see when I open my eyes every day. Can you guess what it is? Though, I have to say, I am notorious for giving tasks that are too easy. See my previous attempt at being mysterious.

It took me a lot of coffee and tea and good music to wake up properly:

One Shot
Visual Assignment 42 - One Shot

I should have read the task more carefully, though, since I missed an important point here – this set of photos doesn’t really tell a story, nor does it create tension, unless you are worried about what I might write into that notebook after all the caffeine that I am about to consume.

By the way, the above set of photos were created from a single shot which looks like this:

My Favourite Things

The photo was taken in front of my holiday house in the country last spring and it shows some of my favourite things, including a Kurt Vonnegut book. As I am a proud resident of Slaughterhouse 4, I chose this picture on purpose here.

If you are wondering what music my ipod was playing at the time, wonder no more. It was my favourite group, Experience Rating. Their new album The Spiritual Equivalent of Oxygen is something I warmly recommend:

AlbumCover
Visual Assignment 44 – An Album Cover

Then I spent some time thinking about people who really matter to me:

Love: In Three Frames
Visual Assignment 357 – Love: In Three Frames

After that, I was ready to face the world. And this time I faced it with a camera in hand.

The school where I teach is in the centre of Belgrade and the day was lovely, so I decided to attempt Visual Assignment 376. I was also influenced by several of our weekly readings, particularly by Photography as Mindful Seeing and the advice that we should take photos of ugly things and constantly search for the odd angle. What this meant for me was walking down the street and quickly shooting random photos at some really weird angles. Some of the photos were terrible, some barely usable. I chose ten of the barely usable ones and kept them just as they were. So I produced this:

UnderConstruction
Visual Assignment 376 – Mission Defamiliarize

After school, I listened to Experience Rating some more and did my Daily Create assignment. I also wrote a blog post.

It was getting rather late at night (or, shall I say, early in the morning) and I was beginning to feel hungry, so first I demotivated myself:

My Demotivational Poster
Visual Assignment 191 – Demotivate Yourself

And then I opened that fridge…







My Ship Has Come In

Friday, June 8th, 2012
Your Dreams Out the Window
Visual Assignments 379 – Your Dreams Out the Window

I have been keeping myself busy at the Macguffin Camp - reading about photography, doing my Daily Create assignments (did each and every one so far this week) and thinking about my visual assignments. I have completed two and the third is under way, but nobody knows about them. The reason why nobody knows about how diligent I have been is that I haven’t updated this blog of mine.

I am going to be brief here, since I desperately want to go back to thinking about my visual assignments. I swear, they are addictive. These days I can’t wait to get home so that I can update my Daily Create and play with my photo editors. I have even started carrying my camera with me and today, when my students left the classroom, I took some more photos (of the classroom and out the window). I did this, I reasoned, so that I could catch the light. Most of my Daily Create photos so far have been Nightly Creates, as I usually do them when I get home from work.

Anyway, what’s this story of my ship coming in?

Visual Assignment 379 asks us to photograph our best daydreaming window and alter it to show what we are dreaming of. I am dreaming of the holiday and of the time I am going to spend at the sea-side with my family. It is as simple as that. Though, while I am at the sea-side, I will have to abstain from the Daily Creates and other Camp activities. You can’t have it all.

And here’s how I did this task:

I used PhotoFiltre. It is not in our packing list, but it is free to download and use. I wrote about PhotoFiltre here.

 I copy-pasted the ship onto the window as shown in this video:

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After that I painted the area around the ship using the brush tool and some dark red paint matching the window.

The result is amateurish, but not too bad.