A thought for the end of the semester

Praise the Lord, O my soul.

O Lord my God, you are very great.

You are clothed with splendor and majesty.

He wraps Himself in light as with a garment.  [...]

He makes winds His messengers,

flames of fire His servants.

He set the earth on its foundations; 

it can never be moved.

You covered it with the deep as with a garment; [...]

But at your rebuke the waters fled,

the sound of your thunder they took to flight; [...]

He makes springs pour water into the ravines;

it flows between the mountains [...]

The birds of the air nest by the waters;

they sing among the branches. [...]

the earth is satisfied by the fruit of His work.

[...] and plants for man to cultivate

[...] wine that gladdens the heart of man,

oil

to make his face shine,

bread,

that sustains his heart. [...]

You bring darkness, it becomes night,

and all the beasts of the forest prowl.

The lions roar for their prey

and seek their food from God.

The sun rises, and they steal away;

they return and lie down in their dens.

Then man goes out to his work,

to his labor until evening.

How many are your works, O Lord!

In wisdom you made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures.

I will sing to the Lord all my life;

I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

_________________

It's hard to fully comprehend that the semester is over. It's been a struggle dealing with sleep loss and project after project, but I think I'd like to make my last official post of the semester (but not last post forever) a dedication to the Lord of all things, who has taken me through the year, minute by minute. 

One of my favorite things to do, something I started doing last summer, was taking photos of random things that I thought were beautiful and then later on finding a Bible passage for which the pictures illustrated the imagery. I think it's a cool way to see how God reveals Himself in everyday life. Usually these projects are kind of lengthy, but I put up some excerpts from one project I did on Psalm 104. Not all the photos are my "best work" per say, but I plan on doing more projects like these in the future with better shots. I also realize the quality is probably pretty bad because I had to get the photos off of facebook since I didn't have them saved already on this computer.

Thanks for reading and checkin' out my blog. And to everyone who went through all the foundations courses this semester, congratulations on finishing this semester and working so hard. And thanks for being a really nice, genuine bunch of people who are fun to create art with :)

Here it is...

Here's the film... don't know about the quality online, but hopefully ya get the idea. Thanks for watching! :)

While I export my movie...

While my movie is exporting, I thought I'd put up some still frames on the good 'ol blog. Basically my process involved doing lots of pencil drawings and making a zillion origami cranes! After I did that I used string and tape and sticky tack to prop up the birds in the positions I wanted them while shooting. My final number of frames was somewhere between 600 and 700... after deleting lots of awful ones. I didn't use all the shots... I narrowed it down to somewhere close to 500. Then I edited the shots in photoshop, trying to adjust the lighting and reduce color casts. Then I dropped them into imovie, added music, voiceovers, titles, transitions... I also had to download imovie 6 in an attempt to speed up some parts of the movie, but that didn't pan out like I had hoped. Overall I like the outcome :P But what I like even more is the fact that it's done! :-D

 

Pigeons

These aren't the best shots, but last Thursday I happened to have my camera with me when I noticed a flock of pigeons on the Green. I walked over to them and they started flying all over the place. In the back of my mind I was thinking, 'better not get too close, because I have class in 5 minutes and I don't want one of these birds to, shall we say, go to the bathroom on me,' haha. Well, thankfully none of them did. I wish I had had my telephoto lens on me to get closer shots, but it was fun trying to follow them and get them in focus while they were flying. I experimented with both color and black and white. 

I've been meaning to put up the alphabet contact sheet, so here it is... I wish I had gotten a better G, J, K, L, Q, U, W, and X. I tried to get a wide color range so that as a set the letters would be eye-catching. My favorite shots are A, because it was a lucky find before the truck drove away, E, because the parts of the letter were created using a slow shutter speed while photographing the water in the fountain, H, because I was desperate at that point to find a good 'H' and just stumbled upon the barbed wire, M and O, because I found them at a Native American cultural display at a fall festival that my roommate and I went to on a whim, N, because it was another shot from the back of a truck just before it drove away, P, because it was one of those shots you can't get more than once and it's a cool organic shape that uses negative space, S, because it's a minute detail that caught the corner of my eye while I was at home by my mother's garden, and V, because I got to use my telephoto lens to capture it (although it would have been better if the turkey vulture was closer and had its wings at a steeper angle). 

BOA Marching Band Competition

Here are some shots from one of my sister's marching band competitions this year. It was in October at Towson. I had fun seeing how closely I could zoom in with my telephoto lens while I was up in the stands. I also tested out the image stabilization on my lens while slowing the shutter speed in order to get the colorguard flags and rifles blurry while the rest of the scene looked sharp. I also did some stop action 'stuff'. Marching band competitions are great places for photoshoots; there's always lots of movement and different colors with each new band and colorguard. 

Music Poster

Here's my final product for the last Digital Media project. The song I based the poster off of was "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. At first I was going to use the lyrics, "My words like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence," but in the end I diverted from this quite a bit. I ended up referencing the lyrics "In restless dreams I walked alone" and "Fools said I you do not know, that silence like a cancer grows" more than my original lyrics. Overall I think I ended up addressing the message of the entire song rather than focusing on two lines of lyrics...

Basically, I started with the idea of wanting to convey an abstract feeling of unsettling quiet. The song talks about silence growing "like cancer," and I had this idea of putting water over plastic wrap on my scanner and then scanning it as I placed drops of ink that would disperse through the water. I thought this would parallel the idea of silence starting as something small and then taking over everything. I did this many times, but I could never get all the wrinkles out of the plastic wrap or get an image that was big enough to use as the background without becoming pixely. So then I tried filling a clear glass bottle with oil and putting water in it and photographing them as they separated. This looked kind of cool, but the contrast between the yellow oil and clear water wasn't strong enough and I was thinking of a cooler color palette, which wouldn't include yellow. So finally I just filled the bottle with water and a couple drops of ink and photographed it. This ended up being the technique that worked best for me. 

So one day when we were working on this project in class, our teacher said he liked the face in the upper left corner of the poster. I looked at my project and I saw the face for the first time; I'd never even noticed it until he saw it. So of course, I wasn't going to ignore his comment and decided that this face, which unintentionally showed up in the ink/water mixture, would have to be incorporated into my design. 

So with the addition of the face, I decided to change my design altogether, even though my plans were pretty vague before. As for the text, I was originally going to make the words out of the water and ink but that was impossibly difficult. Instead, I wrote the words "Words" "Echo" and "Silence" in charcoal and scanned them in, moving the paper while I scanned. Eventually I got one that I liked and overlaid this in the composition. I put it in Illustrator and did a live trace on it, and then made the preset "Inked Drawing." Then I put a "fresco" filter over the text, then a "feather" effect, and then a "watercolor" filter. Then I warped it with the "fish eye" tool and increased the % of bend and distortion, and then the "twist" tool and again adjusted the % of bend and distortion. I tried to make the text blend into the composition enough so that it looked like part of the design and not something slapped over top. I also tried to make it frame the face a little bit.

Then I took the image back into Photoshop. I used a photo of water in a fountain that I had taken for the project and used the clone stamp at a reduced opacity to add some blue and some texture to parts of the composition, mostly framing the outside. Then I used the dodge and burn tools to emphasize the lines in the ink because they were starting to get a little bit lost, and to bring out the features of the face more so the face didn't look accidental or unapparent. The last step was going back with the paintbrush to darken up some of the letters in the words and add some more lines to some of the letters. 

Overall I'm pretty happy with it, but like most people I think it looked better on the monitor than in the print-out. I also noticed little marks here and there that I would've liked to have removed with the clone stamp, but didn't see them on the screen. I really enjoyed this project, and I think using those printers is slightly less intimidating now :)