ABSTRACTION
The purpose of this assignment was to become familiar with abstract photography. We had to take pictures based on a couple abstract thumbnails. I really enjoyed driving around and keeping an eye out for anything that could be abstracted, turns out its a lot of things! I also discovered that photographs can become a lot more absract through editing, like turning up the contrast and making it black and white.
This shoot was inspired by the photographer that I did my researsh project on, Man Ray, specifially his Rayographs. I did this by expiremnting witn the scanner on my printer. At first I started by just scanning a bunch of still objects, such as my hand, some pearls, a chinese bill, my face, and a flower. But then, I discovered that if I moved the objects while they were scanning, they would appear streetched and warped, which I loved! I decided not to edit them that much becuase I thought it was really interesting how the visual effects were created orgainically and I wanted to keep that.
I decided to use the scans from my Man Ray inspired shoot for my diptych and triptych. I really loved the idea of playing with a visual flow through my images. In the diptych, its the bill and in the triptych, the string of pearls. I also really liked playing the asymytry in both, making them look a little off balenced.
For this assignment, we walked around the Norton Simon Museum as a class to take photos for an hour. We had a lot of freedom for this prompt as the only guideline was abstraction. I really enjoyed doing this with my classmates and the museum has some great sculptures and trees that were fun to photograph. For editing, I made the majority black and white and turned up the contrast.
Positive
Purple Kaleidoscope
Negative
For the photogram, we made a darkroom in the staff bathroom and exposed light-sensitive paper to light for a couple of seconds in order to create images. For mine, I selected a string of pearls, my necklace and rings, a crystal, and some mesh netting to see the shapes they would create. The original image was the negative which I accentuated the contrast of in Photoshop to make the shapes more clear. I also created a positive version as well as a kaleidoscope one that I added purple coloring to. I loved this project!