Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Reimagining Visual Framing
I picked Sally Mann’s One Big Snake. I was drawn to the photo because of the peace necklace that the boy is wearing. It is the only thing the boy has on which causes the audience to further focus on the necklace when they examine the picture. The original photo is a MS shot of a shirtless boy who is holding some type of snake skin in his wingspan. The snake covers up his eyes, and lines up with the horizon and the upper horizontal third in the photo. Mann also uses limited space in the photo by there being a background area but because it is out of focus the attention is automatically shifted to the boy because the viewer can not see clearly what is behind him. Mann uses a lot of lines in the photo but in different directions. The horizon, snake and the boy’s arms have horizontal lines, but they intersect with the vertical line his body makes. The intersection is where the new shape is introduced. It is the peace necklace and this intersection of lines makes the circle necklace pop even more. Mann also use the necklace itself to point directly at the peace sign by using two diagonal lines. The two shapes give a contrast from the boy’s actions which are all lines and the boy’s only piece of attire, the circular necklace. I changed the picture by making it an extreme close up of just the necklace. This gives more attention to the picture but it has much less of an effect. Instead of being something that the viewers’ eyes discover it is something that is just thrown in the viewers’ face. The space becomes flat because you can’t see anything behind the boy. You also lose all the contrast between line and shapes. The circle peace necklace does not have the same importance anymore because it is not contrasting itself from anything. It is the only shape that can be seen. I think Sally Mann framed the picture like this because she wanted her audience to find what she had hidden in the picture. Of course she could have just taken an extreme close up of a peace sign but it would not have the same feel for her or the audience.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Brainwash
http://changethis.com/manifesto/66.01.Brainwashed/pdf/66.01.Brainwashed.pdf
Seth Godin talks about the fact that we have to acknowledge the lizard so we can ignore it, allowing our creativity to not be held back. Godin explains that humans like lizards fear the idea of being laughed at. When this fear takes over a person, the creative side gets shut down and society was able to do this to brainwash people into doing something. They create a fear that if you don’t do something or don’t do it their way then you will have to pay the consequences for your actions. Godin says that only way to not allow the fear to hinder our creative process is to recognize when this happens and to understand that the only way to achieve it creatively is to move past the fear. This ties in with the blog we are working on because if you fear that people will wrongfully laugh at your idea, then you are not going to be true to your creative self and you wont be able to make yourself better at what you want to do. Another topic Godin talks about is to learn. He explains that school was created to teach kids a trade, or a single skill so they can achieve one job. Now jobs are no longer like that which means that school, a helpful stepping stone, is not the last step to learning. You have to constantly learn if you want to achieve. You have to learn from other people, your success, your failures, youtube, blogs and anything else that is out there to for you to learn from. The tie in with this topic and the blog is that we learn the basics about a lot of different things in class but it is up to us to take the knowledge to the next level. We have to meet with other students, read books, talk to professors and learn from youtube how to do more advanced techniques. I feel like these ideas are very useful. There are some students who can achieve everything they want simply from school, but there are others who can’t be reached by the way school systems are set up and I believe they should teach the ideas Godin has because they can be important to any students access. Students need to learn that there is more to learning then Math and Science. At an early age kids have to know that there is more than being a scientist, doctor, lawyer or teacher. They need to be able to experience everything so that they can do what they are best fit for which will in return be more beneficial to the country’s economy.
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