Final Project Thoughts

I began planning my final project with the desire to create landscapes. I decided to present these landscapes as panoramas for a number of reasons. I was really impressed with th ePhotomerge tool in Photoshop and because Madelyn and I did not use this feature for our Cassonia project, I wanted to attempt using this feature. Additionally, I wanted to create images that were relatively large, which panoramas enabled me to do. My motive for including the figures was largely because I wanted an additional element besides just landscapes and thus, depicting people and how they interacted and altered a viewer's "reading" of the photograph seemed like a logical step to take. How to incorporate the figures was rather challenging. At the beginning of the project I was faced with a number of questions: How might positioning someone in the distance versus positioning someone in the foreground affect an individual’s understanding of the image? Do I want the figures to be actually doing something in the shot or be more subtle, and just “present”? Since I was shooting outside, altering the time of day was also something I considered. I was inspired by Tanja's (from the Bakery) landscape work and her unconventional horizon line. I decided to embrace this and present a trip-tych landscape with varying horizon lines. I then expanded upon this idea by deciding to shoot three different scenes in order to present three trip-tcyh landscape scenes in the form of a landscape (not as they appear on my blog). Presenting the images in this manner proved to be the most effective way for the audience to view each image individually but also as part of the collective body of work.

I ultimately chose to present the figures as components of the landscape, minimally interacting with the space whether alone or in a pair. I did not want their actions to be too distracting since the overall theme of my project was investigating how our perceptions of an image (ie a landscape) differs when people are included. I wanted the spotlight to be on the relationship between nature and human life, as opposed to just having the figure take center stage. I shot a number of times (nearly 500 images total!) and was incredibly satisfied with the end result. I am especially happy that I was able to re-shoot the pines scene because the snow adds a nice variety of color to the entire body of work. Overall, I am pleased with the final result of this project (could have matted a little better-- but isn't that always the case?). I am really fascinated with depicting space in general- How can the same space be represented in different ways? How can our conventions of space be altered? What happens when human life enters space? etc- and hope to continue pursuing this interest in my future photographic endeavors.