Assignment 6 - Conceptual Portraiture

This assignment near murdered me...
I was struggling with the theme for some reason, maybe cuz I wasn't around to attend this particular lecture & the subsequent tutorials due to stupid gastric that I wasn't able to fully comprehend what exactly I was supposed to do, but that's not the point.
I went to see other people's blog and saw their work and all the more I was confused by the theme and all~
I probably struggled for two whole weeks with only a really vague concept which ultimately when I emailed ms chiang about it, she thought it was too much of a straight photography (I wanted to take pictures of unsung heroes, people who are always there but under the radar such as the sweepers, the kitchen cleaners etc, you get my drift. However it would be extremely difficult to ask these ppl to pose for me so in a way I was kind of glad that ms chiang didn't really like the idea... =P)
Anyways, I finally thought of this idea only when Jamie offered to be my model if I required her 'services' so I was really cracking my brain as time was running out and voila! Finally something just struck me la~

The concept is "Everyday Reading" meaning to say that everyday, everyone be it young or old, working or not, people are always reading something from somewhere. We people just cannot run away from reading. In fact I could have taken more photos of reading from different mediums but let's not go into that.... =P Anyways I managed to have 6 photos with this simple concept and photoshopped all the photos like no one's biz, cuz... Nobody's skin is perfect *wink* etc... Hopefully it looks conceptual cuz i know it's really not too wild and all so hopefully it won't come off as too straight photographic-like... =(

Hope you enjoy this series of photos! =D

Click to Reveal Photos

Reading from a magazine

Ah show photos of myself first.... Anyways this one is me, as a student, on a bed, enjoying a light read from the magazine for leisure purposes.
I took this from a tripod as is the next photo, was entirely exhausted running back and forth, cuz either the lighting wasn't good or my hair was disheveled or my pose was off... =\

Reading from textbooks

And this is still me as a student, mugging for exams. As you can see, I'm trying to portray that whether or not for leisure or for school, you can't run away from reading something.

Reading from a laptop

Jamie here is portrayed as an ordinary adult @ Starbucks doing what Singaporeans do best which is to leech the free bandwidth provided by the cafe =P Anyways leeching or not, she's reading from a laptop, be it for leisure or work, checking emails or online shopping, that's still reading.

Reading from books in a library

Jamie in a library, and what do you do in a library? You read of course, and there are so many different genres from fiction to non-fiction to self-help books to comics etc that there's no way you can run away from it...
(And actually this was taken from Kinokuniya since I only found out on that day that the orchard branch library was closed down quite some time! Still it works as a library photo la hor? This picture could have been taken better but we had to come here on two separate occasions and still the quality of the photo wasn't fabulous cuz the sales people there kept telling us that we're not allowed to take any pictures in the shop... Yeah encountered that a lot that's for sure...

Reading from a proposal @ work

Even @ work there's no running away from reading something, especially when you're a white collar worker, there's no reason that you're not reading something be it on the PC, proposals, fax, complaint letters, reports and so on...

Reading from a newspaper

And how can we forget reading from the newspapers? It's our guide to general knowledge and some people just cannot do without reading their good ol daily local papers. It helps to increase your general knowledge as well as a good way to find topics when chatting with people =D

~Cheers & good luck to everyone's exams!

Blog Exercise 5 - Ethics

Ethics can be a tricky question because there is no clear definition on the word. What is ethics exactly? Some may say that it is not ethical to do certain things but others might totally disagree on the same matter so there's really just a fine line~ And when photography comes into play depending on your profession, ethics are essentially what photographers should live by.
Without it, photographers lose their credibility and their sense of responsibility towards the public especially if the photographer is for a reputable newspaper say eg The Straits Times, unless of course if you're a photographer for tabloid papers or magazines, then in such cases, ethics sometimes count for nuts....
In this era of digital manipulation, whereby celebrities on magazine covers look almost always flawless, or whereby using composition with different photos to make something look incredulous such as a baby sitting in a crocodile's mouth, etc, how then do us readers judge the credibility of the images?

Personally like i mentioned above, if the photographers are from a reputable and credible medium in references to newspapers, then most of the time readers should be able to trust them as they are "supposed" to report on true events, or judge for ourselves if the photos look too incredulous to be true.
In cases of say fashion magazines, most readers should know that the models or celebrities on covers are photoshopped as in the case of the Dove commercial but there will still be some clueless readers who are not as tech saavy or knows much about photoshop so it really depends on the general knowledge of the reader. And as much as I can say a few more ways to judge the credibility of an image, if the person who is manipulating the photo is really good at what he/she does, then it is most of the time difficult to tell whether the image has been retouched before whether or not it comes from a credible source and whether or not the reader is tech saavy etc.
And if readers are constantly shown images that are manipulated, chances are that they might become unconcerned about the truthful content of the photos itself and that in itself is more of a concern.

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If i am working for a newspaper and I'm supposed to response to a reader complaining about a picture of a car wreck that was to him/her very upsetting, then referring to utilitarianism theory, I would response by saying that the photo was taken to show the truth to the public and by no means meant to offend anyone. It is shown to warn the public that these things do happen to people and will act for the greater good of the public.

However of course there has to be a certain limit as to how gruesome or violent the photo can be to be published for public's viewing as public also refer to children or the underaged. There might be certain materials that are deemed not suitable for these people. In fact the media has often been criticized for showing so many violent or gory images to the public that it results in the public becoming hardened towards violent injustices, which would be critically bad for the society if we were all to become emotionless.

Thus if the picture that the reader complained is really too gory, then I might have to apologise to the reader and inform him/her that we would evaluate the limits of such publications in future. I would do that because being from a newspaper organisation doesn't mean that we are always right or truthful. In fact we would have a responsibility towards the public over what we publish and whether it is ethical or not.

But if I do stand by the case that the picture which was supposedly too upsetting for the reader, was in fact within reasonable limits then I will have to let the reader know like what i had mentioned in the earlier paragraph, that we intend to show the truth for the better of society, so that the public can be more well-informed of such incidents and take better precautions themselves.

Assignment 5

This week, we were supposed to take photos of things to portray expressions without the use of humans, animals or toys that resemble these things.
Meaning we were supposed to take pictures of happiness or joy of say maybe some colourful flowers etc instead of using human's expression.
Ah such a tough week yet again... But thankfully I managed, whilst barely but i managed to scrap past... I think...

Click to Reveal Photos

I took this picture at my void deck, i found it rather desolate or deserted in a sense whereby a wheelchair gets dumped at the void deck yet rather sad at the same time cuz it's being chained up. Like there's nowhere to run... Ya well people have been asking me why I have so many interesting photos from my void deck (refer to assignment 3 for the high key photo =P) but I dunno man! They are just there for me and I'm glad!! Haha! Oh ya I desaturated the photo slightly to get this look. Looks like another high key image i think =P

Well i renamed this Hope since Peace didn't really go so well with many people due to the dark clouds. Anyways Hope is more apt i guess as there seems to be light/hope behind the darkness.... Lame i know, but that's honestly how i perceived it!! And it looks exactly the part too! Apt i would say =)

Ah, I also renamed this from Turmoil to Messy, I guess it's not turmoil enough but it is really quite messy. It's also taken around my hdb block where there are tons of construction going on. So ya my area here is really a good place to take pictures for this assignment as can be seen for the next photo, really...

This is called disorder cuz out of all the flats in the block, only this one has like a jungle-like erm jungle creeping out of the flat! I wanted to take pictures of more of the flats above or below it to showcase and compare how much of a disorder it look but was unable to, cuz it was either too far that the impact wasn't strong enough (cuz taken from downstairs) or too near which is the result of this picture as my flat was really the closest to it and this was as best as I could take. There isn't any flats opposite the block such that I can take it from a better proximity too. Anyways I'll probably retake the shot at a better lighting as Ms Chiang had suggested. =D

Cheers!

Blog Exercise 4 - Singapore Biennale 2008

It was my first biennale and i must say I'm pretty impressed with how they converted City Hall/supreme court and South Beach Complex into a myriad of random art pieces that just seem to piece themselves together nicely even though there's no specific theme to all the work
And i love it that the pieces are all relatively highly interactive such as the huge Singapore map which was taken from Google Earth sprawled across the floor.
You'll be given two pieces of black sticker in which you can write and stick it onto the map/floor or do whatever you want with it =P

Click to Reveal Photos

Anyways one of the more successful pieces in which i enjoyed was probably the Aquilizan, Alfredo Juan & Gaudinez-Aquilizan, Maria Isabel's artwork called:

Address ( Project: Another Country)

This project represents a developmental process whereby many personal objects were collected 'cubed' by Balikbayan boxes. These are boxes that many Filipino migrants use to transport their personal belongings home. There are 140 of these cubes/boxes that are used to build this room with a door but without a ceiling.
I think it looks wonderful as it's supposed to be like what a garang guni man would be interested in and very messy too yet it is cubed in such a way that it is neat and can even be constructed into a room, quite awesome to say the least
There are also come "treasures" found in this tidy mess

Pardon the pun... =P But yeah look at all those animated children's tales videos by Hans Christian Andersen! And yeah a VHS of Spiceworld the movie haha....


Anyways the piece that I find it weirdest or rather something that I can't really appreciate or understand was probably this one:

Leeroy New - Teratoma ll: War of the Worlds

Well, it looks like different coloured C3PO (the golden looking robot from Star Wars) standing on top of city hall~ Well yeah it's probably smart to use the space and the building as the UFO itself but it feels more like a game/movies figurines exhibition rather than an artistic one plus i don't understand what's those white stuff protruding out from the building. It looks like those dead corals or something, so maybe the artist is trying to portray that? I don't really know or understand... Sorry...

Cheers!

Assignment 4 - Urban Fantasy

Theme: Surrealism

This was a really mind boggling project but I guess I managed it =\
The main concept is that Singapore being an urban city is being ironically (since it is an island~) consumed by water as a comet or whatever you make of it hits the Singapore River. Nobody or rather humans survived the catastrophe yet however the animals triumph through evolution, they grew wings so they are able to live on.
It's sort of saying that whilst we are advancing towards the technological side of life, we have in a way neglected our nature and the animals but nature has its way of having its revenge and prove us humans wrong that we can do whatever we want when it is nature who will triumph in the end.

The Process:

Click to Reveal Photos

These are the pictures used for the photo manipulation:

Nigeria falls in Canada, taken when I was touring in the US and took a short tour there too. As you can see the final product has far more water on the bottom right, that's because the original picture is not big enough so I had to clone it and also utilised the heal tool.

After having the desired width already I just thought it would be interesting to insert some buildings since it's about urban fantasy....

The view in front of the Esplanade. This was taken in a rush as my boyfriend was helping the Caucasian couple take a snapshot.
I thought they really look cute together so I took it as a "souvenir" =P
I could have used other photographs just solely of the view but somehow I just took this, not sure why either.
To select and crop out just the buildings I used the extract tool under Filter. Really useful tool once you've mastered it.

And then out of the blue, I wanted to include animals into the picture purely because I like animals more than humans hoho!

And so a pig is born. This was taken in the zoo and I also used the extract tool for the selection.

And then of course one animal was not enough.......

So I included this giraffe! This first one appeared in the final product as the giraffe on the extreme right, and then later re-appeared as the one right in front as I thought I needed more giraffes to give it a more uniform look rather than noah's ark with so many different kinds of animals. Plus I was running out of giraffe photos so I had to reuse it and just tilted it so that it looks different... =P
It has a surreal looking face so in a way to reflect that they are very calm despite being in the water and walking towards the big gaping hole.

And yes more giraffes~ same explanation as the above plus it has a baby (k fine, a child~~) giraffe! It gave it an even more calm feel to it...


Anyway for the rest of the image, the sky is manipulated entirely, I filled in with a dark blue background and used Filter>Render>Clouds to well, produce the clouds in the sky. The moon is fake as well using Filter>Distort> Spherize.
I'm probably going to add a some rays from the moon to sort of fake a sense of source of lighting~
Even though we know that the moon is not a source of light but it's my fantasy right so I don't really care, plus it would give it a mysterious feel to it which is the whole idea of this concept.
There's also fog on the horizon and also on the buildings itself as it's supposed to say like that the buildings are fading into the past already and the animals will the future of tomorrow~ =)
The fog is created using a new layer and selecting the area where I wanted it to be foggy and then used the Filter>Render>Clouds again and under the layers thingy I selected screen so that it looks more real, and also to lower the opacity.
The wings were from my collection of brush tools and using the same left wing and right wing to create all the wings here.
Shadows were also added using the soft brush and lowering the opacity.
Of course overall the pictures would be manipulated using saturation and levels tool as well to adjust the colour and brightness of the images.
Lastly I added two more layers of overlay in dark blue so that the different images would look like they are all there instead of being copy and pasted inside.

Very tedius but it was quite fun to do I guess =)

Cheers!