Assignment 6: End Blog - One Shot Summary

There are images I had grown attached to during this course. My favorite picture, by a very wide margin, is the Ronald McDonald peering out the firewall - I think it's odd in a way that sums up my aesthetic sensibilities and sense of humor, and I loved post-processing it as I always love messing around on Photoshop more than taking actual photos - but I'd concluded using it to summarize my learnings for the course would be dishonest. "Auto" is not a value, after all, and I can't Photoshop my way out of everything. While it is just a mundane snap among my mundane snaps, I consider this to symbolize my experiences.

First, this is the second half of two shots: I had taken them for Assignment 5a having mistaken my smartphone of being capable of aperture control, and thought it funny to present them as a narrative pair. The first is exactly the same as this, with the Karkat plush in focus, color balanced warmly, looking hopeful; it would have been named This Town is Big Enough for Both of Us, Lampcat. And this, as the second, with the Lampcat in focus and the contrasting cool color temperature, would've been named Oh, Karkat... No It Isn't. (Had I found a way to attach a tiny toy gun or knife to the lamp in the latter, it would've amused me further.) The idea that the cuter, more innocent-looking toy would backstab the other energized me enough to want to submit them, even though I knew they were objectively bland pictures, and then I realized they didn't fit the submission requirement. This proves, to me, many things:

• I had tended to not retain instructions regarding submissions.

• Finding something funny is the driving force behind perhaps a good 80% of my creative decisions (a case can be made that they extend to that percentage of my decisions, period)

• I like taking pictures of small things on grimy walls, and will likely continue to take more because of how fun this aspect of photography has been for me.

• While I had learned how to control my camera's settings, I was not yet at a level, even after all this time, where I could beat my phone's own Auto mode. (Forced now to have a better eye for resolution, I'm always frustrated now by how I can't get my subjects sharp enough.)

I had only set a modest goal for myself in my midpoint blog - to create a fun story in a shot, which I think I have not met. This isn't a fun enough story or a good enough shot, compared to my own benchmarks (Succession and Challengers! In hindsight the ambition astounds me) and certainly not compared to my classmates' works. About midway through the term I had begun bookmarking pictures I find "photographically funny" - not in the way a meme's humor is often off of the already-humorous pose or facial expression it's depicting, but off of pure composition and subject matter - as inspiration for MMS 173, and the king of them all is this shot by Chris Perry of a NASA spacecraft flinging a frog in the air. The tiny, shadowy, helplessly airborne frog against the craft that was supposed to be the carefully-composed star of the picture - I laugh every time I see it. I laughed looking it up for this blog!I knew if I was going to take mundane pictures they had to have that quality that'd make them appeal to someone the way the NASA frog picture clearly appeals to me, but even my own abstruse tastes were not satisfied.

Suffice it to say, I feel that regardless of my grade I'd failed the course in my own eyes. I had not notably improved, apart from finally figuring out the smartphone camera I'd just mindlessly clicked at for years, and I had not exerted the effort necessary to do so. From viewing myself as an average photographer among the class my opinion has lowered to put me somewhere in the lower third, where, yes, I'm still capable of understanding and executing the elements and principles of visual art, but it's ultimately a lot of talk that barely shows in my own portfolio. I did have fun, certainly, but this is not difficult to achieve; in a good mood I find most non-sports, non-machinery things to be fun. Nor is it a plus when it doesn't translate to doing well - I'm certainly not an "it's about the journey, not the destination" person, and if I'm doing neither well (showing skill or talent) nor my best (showing effort and diligence), what am I here for?

(I didn't interact in forums and I quietly listened to some of the Zoom sessions. This is nothing against the course, the classmates, or the FIC at all, and in fact I truly appreciate the presence of all these resources; transparently, I have put in little more than the bare minimum in all my courses across the board, so it is in no way personal.)

For me to do well by my own standards I would probably have to actually plan photography sessions early, instead of the rush towards the deadline that my photographs have been. I had learned that compared to the half or so hour I was willing to put into snapping dozens of pictures in my little high school photography workshop, I have, if anything, grown less patient and start to settle for the least-bad picture maybe twenty minutes into the process, and I should retrain the attention span with hours of photography, if it had to come down to it. I think I should also do more portraits, as I'd enjoyed directing my siblings for my assignments and love looking at interesting pictures of people; the fact that most of the people I'm close to are mortified of being on camera (and so am I) means finding ways to photograph their energy while obscuring their face in some way might prove to be a fun challenge, someday. I would definitely invest in actually good equipment, too. But would I - if my personal pride as a "multimedia creative" (and therefore, someone who should be capable of making things that are not just drawings) had not been wounded - exert so much effort in specifically improving my photography?

Maybe not.

I appreciate much more the passion that goes into the craft but it is not a passion I have, still. Love for craft means caring about minutia the layman wouldn't usually notice or care for, and a gummy worm on a leaf (one of the other "photographically funny" pictures I'd saved) is a gummy worm on a leaf to me, and therefore already a deeply compelling picture even if its exposure, composition, depth of field, or color balance would've been a little off. 

What, then, is my most important takeaway from the class, when I'm ending it unsatisfied with my works and with little genuine love for photography?

I'd watched the Eulogy episode of Black Mirror when the latest season dropped in April and sobbed about it long into the next autoplayed episode. (If you aren't aware, it's about a man digitally navigating defaced photos of his recently-deceased ex-girlfriend to uncover some memories to present at her funeral.) A little before that, an elderly family friend had died - not close enough that I knew of their existence apart from their name (I didn't even remember what they looked like), but enough that my grandmother hauled an ancient photo album out to find a photograph of them to post. She'd picked a formal group picture and lamented how there were none of just the deceased, or perhaps one where it was just them and my family. Then, as elderly people somehow have the humor to do, cheerfully pointed out who else in the group picture had already died. 

Forgive the morbid turn, but I have thought in the back of my mind since that I would like, myself, to have a huge photo album, filled to the brim - not even necessarily with good pictures, although they would certainly make for more attractive posting in whatever hyper-advanced technology we'd have if I reach my grandmother's age, God willing. Just a lot of them, enough to hold and reminisce with - printed, tangible, unlike the hundreds of snaps in my gallery that I could wipe out without a care. I don't want to lose the people, places, and animals I love and only hold them in my imperfect memory, and I don't want the same to happen should that fate befall me. Something is better than nothing. Lots of bad pictures, which, if I care enough to remedy their badness, become less-bad, until they at some point, through many, many attempts, even dare to be good - and not just good in the way that only I am amused. That's perhaps what I took from having spent the past assignments thinking carefully about the pictures I take: to take and save lots of them, portfolio-worthy or not. Before I forget.