MMS 173 Assignment 4: Bucketlist

This is my kitten Tikoy, on the topmost platform of our cat tree, for Height. I had to lay on the ground right beside it and aim my phone upwards at her. I wanted Tikoy to be the sharpest in the picture to emphasize just how high up she is, and simulated a more shallow depth of field than the raw picture had by masking out a Gaussian blur, so the tower closer to the camera is out of focus. I also wanted to make it look a bit more magical - Tikoy's expression and pose make it look like she's contemplating the lofty task (for a tiny cat like her) of climbing down the giant tower - so I overexposed the picture a little and added more of a golden hue.

Psst... Want Some Fries with That?

For Pattern I chose to shoot the pattern of holes in the firewall between my and my next-door neighbor's house. I put a Ronald McDonald toy to provide a focal point breaking the monotony of the holes and introduce some story - I had Stephen King's Pennywise peering out of the sewers in mind. It was important to me that the toy was clear enough to be notable, but not immediately - to be a slight, silly jumpscare - and that the focus would also be sharp enough to show the grime of the wall juxtaposed against Ronald's smooth plastic. I'd cropped it down to 3552x2537px (7:5) to remove unnecessary detail - nudging Ronald's eye to be exactly in the lower-right intersection of the rule of thirds grid - flipped the picture (initially the toy was on the left side of the frame) so your eye is guided, left-to-right, to him, and then color-graded it to have deeper, colder shadows and warmer highlights. This is so the bright parts of the picture would be more approachable and then fade out to slightly more ominous shadows at the edge of the frame. It makes it look both funny and uncanny to me.

Bedtime Guardian

This is my little brother cloaked in a blanket and holding a cat lamp for Night. My phone turns up grainy, artifacted messes every time I shoot at low light so I decided to go for a frame-within-a-frame composition (the lamp framed by hands and blanket in a sea of darkness) where editing the artifacting out simply by making it pure black would help the storytelling instead of hindering it. I'd contemplated cropping tightly so the cat lamp would be framed by equal amounts of blanket and darkness, but decided to keep the black lower half of the picture to evoke the look of a small child (I'd knelt down to get the angle) approaching the offered light.

Bright Dead Things

There is a gumamela plant in front of our house that was the easiest candidate for Flower, but I was honestly far more interested in the pile of dead blooms that always accumulate on the ground (and which we have to sweep) every day. I wanted to somehow contrast the bright, healthy flowers with the dead pile below - its eventual fate. (The picture's title is taken from the name of the poetry collection by Ada Limon, which has a similar theme.) I did not anticipate the struggle to get both the living and dead gumamela into an appealing composition - there's a wall slightly taller than 5ft between the plant and the pile, and even this shot (taken by me, a five-footer, standing on a chair and clutching to the wall) was still just unsatisfactory coaxed into the rule of thirds somewhat through cropping down to 1790x3181px (16:9) and rotating. While I did intend for the living gumamela in the foreground to be out of focus (still making it occupy nearly half the frame to show its importance), I dislike the static arrangement of the elements and the way the petals and pistil touch the edge of the frame, however I like how the branch from the living plant overlaps with the pile - though it covers it somewhat, it creates the illusion of a flower (stem and all) created entirely of dead ones.

Whippin'

Motion, I knew, would be difficult with my smartphone; the one motion I could think of that would not be significantly impacted by the incorrect amount of motion blur would be a hair toss in the vein of Mariya Takeuchi's Plastic Love cover photo. Because no one in my family enjoys being on camera, my sibling - who has a bob with front sections of hair that go down past their chest - opted to instead continuously shake their head, aided by a breeze to give their hair some kind of direction of motion. I'd cropped the picture to 1488x1488px (1:1), removed the color (both as an additional nod to the Takeuchi inspiration and because the colored blur of my sibling's hair made it look much more amateurish than it still does above), and rotated the image to introduce a little more dynamism.