Author: Rachael

Photomontage critiques

Today (March 2) we will do in-class critiques, offering feedback on a handful of projects as a large group. By Wednesday March 4, I’m asking you to complete a written critique for two classmates outside of class time. Your critique group will be assigned in class, so contact me if you are absent on March 2. Post your critiques as replies in the Blackboard threads started by your assigned group members. The critiques you write should be substantial (totalling at least 400 words each) and draw on specific examples from your classmates’ photomontages.

Use the questions below to structure your written critiques. You may choose to focus on some questions more than others, depending on the photomontage.

Arrangement

Describe how your eye moves (or doesn’t move) across the composition. You might comment on:

Focal point, or “cornerstone“: What one thing seems most important in the photomontage? What appears to be the “anchor” element upon which other elements are built?

Entry point: Similar to the focal point. Do you connect or relate to anything in the photomontage, leading you to continue looking? Or do you feel unsure about where to look first?

Static and dynamic elements: What element(s) express movement and lead your eye around the composition? What element(s) seem sturdy or grounded, perhaps as part of the foreground or background?

Please offer suggestions for improving the arrangement of the composition.

Unity

Describe your impression of the overall look of the photomontage. You might comment on:

Repetition: What elements are repeated in the photomontage?

Contrast: What elements provide contrast? Does anything seem to stick out arbitrarily from the composition?

Juxtaposition: What is the purpose of any disruptive juxtaposition, in which dissimilar elements are brought together unexpectedly? Does the juxtaposition have a purpose or is it just random?

Please offer suggestions for improving unity in the composition.

craftsmanship

Does the photomontage look carefully constructed, or do you see pixelation, ragged edges, or other rough spots?

Content

What is this photomontage communicating? Given what the artist wrote on Blackboard about his or her intentions, do you think the collage is mostly successful, or is the communication unclear?

Hawk Career Network Series: Marketing & Communications

An upcoming Career Development Center event might interest some of you:

Wednesday, March 4, Campion Student Center, Doyle Banquet Hall South, 5:30 PM

Meet alumni and other professionals from the marketing and communications fields. Learn about their positions and career paths, get “insider’” advice on their companies, and build valuable relationships with people who are excited to support your own career plans. Refreshments will be served.

Starting week 7

I have posted guidelines for Project 2: Dada photomontage. Today, we’ll talk about the project (what is a photomontage? what is Dada?) and start to generate ideas for what you might create.

Here are the notes I’m using to introduce Dada: http://tinyurl.com/com202dada 

Also, don’t forget about the weekly help sessions with Communication Studies faculty member Andy Famiglietti. Andy knows Photoshop, so he could be a great resource for you if you get stuck.

Weekly help session schedule (NOTE THE LOCATION CHANGE)

  • Wednesdays 2-3 in BRONSTEIN, 1st floor (open collaboration area)
  • Thursdays 11-12  in BRONSTEIN, 1st floor (open collaboration area)

Screenshot 2015-02-22 16.49.34

 

“Little History of Photography”

Here are some of the photographs that are not shown in Benjamin’s essay despite being mentioned.

Eugène Atget, Maison à Versailles (1921)
Eugène Atget, Maison à Versailles (1921)
Images:
Images: Ads for daguerreotype studios in Cincinnati, OH and Mobile, AL between 1844 and 1851
Image: Kitty Anderson visiting card (1861)
Image: Kitty Anderson visiting card (1861)
Image: Kafka as a boy (1888)
Image: Kafka as a boy (1888)
Image: Eadweard Muybridge, Athlete Walking (1887)
Image: Eadweard Muybridge, Athlete Walking (1887)
Image: Eadweard Muybridge, Miscellaneous Acts of Motion (1887)
Image: Eadweard Muybridge, Miscellaneous Acts of Motion (1887)
Image: Étienne-Jules Marey, Bird Flight, Pelican (1886)
Image: Étienne-Jules Marey, Bird Flight, Pelican (1886)
Image: Example of combination printing by Henry Peach Robinson, When the Day's Work is Done (1877)
Image: Example of combination printing by Henry Peach Robinson, When the Day’s Work is Done (1877)
Image: Robert Boursnell, Couple with the Spirit of an Old Family Doctor who Died Around 1880 (1893)
Image: Robert Boursnell, Couple with the Spirit of an Old Family Doctor who Died Around 1880 (1893)

Upcoming events

There are a few events coming up this week that you might be interested in attending. I know you get the emails, but sometimes the good stuff slips by! A couple great ways to celebrate and recognize Black History Month.

Panel: “The Voting Rights Act of 1965: A Fifty Year Assessment”

Part of the CAS Dean’s Colloqium Series, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965: A Fifty Year Assessment” examines the various aspects of civil rights, income and wealth equality and issues of social justice. The panel will include Melissa A. Logue, Ph.D., Monica Smith, Ph.D., Laura Crispin, Ph.D., and Katie M. Oxx, Ph.D., and will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 18 from 4 to 5 p.m., on the 5th floor of the McShain Residence Center.

“Transformative Photography: Evaluation and Best Practices for Eliciting Social and Policy Changes”

Emily Moscato, Ph.D., assistant professor of food marketing, will discuss her article “Transformative Photography: Evaluation and Best Practices for Eliciting Social and Policy Changes” from the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. The lecture will take place on Thursday, Feb. 19 from 12 to 1 p.m., in the Post Learning Commons’ Wachterhauser Seminar Room.

“Dear White People” Screening and Discussion

On Friday, Feb. 20, the Office of Multicultural Life will host a screening of “Dear White People,” a satirical drama focusing on black college students. The film will be shown from 5 to 8 p.m., in the Forum Theatre. A brief discussion will follow the screening, and refreshments will be provided. (Note from Rachael: I have heard great things about this movie.)

Tips for Chapter 6 (color models) in Foundations

Chapter 6 in Foundations of Digital Art has a few “quirks” that will likely present unnecessary stumbling blocks for you. Here are the three sticky points that I encountered:

Change the Foreground color.
Change the Foreground color.

Page 118: “Double-click the Foreground color chip at the bottom left of the Tools panel.” She is talking about this (see image at right):

Page 119: “Drag the blue layer to Create a new layer icon.” You can just right-click on a layer and select “Duplicate layer” to create a copy of it.

Page 120:  “Press the Lock icon in the Layers panel to lock the transparent parts of the cyan layer.” Actually you press the “Lock transparent pixels” icon, circled below:

Lock transparent pixels.
Lock transparent pixels.

Do your best to get through Chapters 4-6 for Wednesday. Whatever you have left to do, bring it to class on Wednesday, and bring your Foundations textbook, as well.

Taking glamorous shots

Image credit: meeps85 on Pinterest
Image credit: meeps85 on Pinterest

Composition matters

  • centered subject is not interesting
  • use tight cropping to draw the eye
  • natural lines also draw the eye
  • use interesting light

Rule of thirds

Which one uses the rule of thirds?

Try it with this photo.

F-stop or depth of field

low f stop

Tonal range

  • 0 is black and X is white (remember html black is #000000)
  • In RGB spectrum, 255 is essentially white light while 0 is black

Vector vs. raster
Bitmap-vs-Vector2

File formats

  • .psd (master photoshop file. Always keep this and save often!!!)
  • .gif (supports animation and transparency, but not gradients)
  • .png (supports transparency and gradients but not animation)
  • .jpg (“lossy”)

Which is best for photos? Which is best for simple logos?

Redistributing pixels compresses or spreads out the pixels in the document. The file size will remain the same.

Resampling pixels down throws pixels away.  Sampling up is a bad idea as software doesn’t know how to do it well – image gets fuzzy (White Space pg. 143)

Image size and resolution

300 dpi (dots per inch) for print — do NOT check “resample image” box

 72 ppi (pixels per inch) for web — check “resample image” box

PrinterDots
Printed image
resolution
Image being sized down for web
kanye
We don’t often see accidental pixels because screen quality is advancing.
001-PixelWhale-Vancouver
Intentionally downgrading image quality can have a special effect.

 

Helvetica highlights

Image credit:
Image credits: Cover of Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939 by Christopher Wilk (left) and Exhibit poster from the Victoria & Albert Museum (right)

Rick Poynor: “Graphic design is the communication framework through which [we receive] these messages about what the world is now, and what we should aspire to. It’s the way they reach us. The designer has an enormous responsibility. Those are the people putting their wires into our heads.”

Image credit:
Image credit: Helvetica

Paula Scher: “The corporate culture was the visual language of big corporations, and at that time [the 60s and 70s] they were persuasively Helvetica. And they looked alike. They looked a little fascistic to me. They were clean. They reminded me of cleaning your room. I felt like it was some conspiracy of my mother’s to make me keep the house clean, that all that my messy room adolescent rebellion was coming back at me in the form of Helvetica and that I had to overthrow it. […] I was also morally opposed to Helvetica because I viewed the big corporations that were slathered in Helvetica as sponsors of the Vietnam War.”

David Carson: “I have no formal training in my field. In my case I’ve never learned all the things I’m not supposed to do. I just did what made sense to me. I was just… experimenting, really. So when people started getting upset, I didn’t really understand why, I said, ‘What’s the big deal? What are you talking about?’ And it was many years later that someone explained to me that, basically, there was this group that spent a lot of time trying to organize things, get some kind of system going, and they saw me going in and throwing that out the window, which I might’ve done, but it wasn’t the starting point, that wasn’t the plan. Only much later I learned what determines modernism, and this and that…”

Image Credit:
Image credit: Helvetica

Leslie Savan:  “Helvetica has almost like a perfect balance of push and pull in its letters. And that perfect balance is saying to us – ‘don’t worry, any of the problems that you’re having, or the problems in the world, or problems getting through the subway, or finding a bathroom… all those problem aren’t going to spill over, they’ll be contained. And in fact, maybe they don’t exist.'”

A few important dates:

– Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso: 1907

– World War I: 1914-1918

– Fountain (“the urinal”) “by” Marcel Duchamp: 1917

– World War II: 1939-1945

– Jack Kerouac writes 11 books between 1951 and 1956 including On the Road

– Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol: 1962 (“The channels switch, but it’s all television.”)

– Vietnam War: 1955-1975

Wrapping up week 5

VIsual resumes due

I’m looking forward to seeing your final version of Project #2 on Friday. Please remember the project has four components. You will have to follow directions carefully to avoid losing points for things like incorrect file formats. Review assignment guidelines here.

You’ll want to allow enough time to write your project narrative. I expect this narrative to show the time and attention that you would give to any college writing assignment worth 15% of your grade: please proofread, think carefully about what points you will make, and structure the document with intention. I don’t expect this narrative to be overly formal in tone or diction; write in the first person, but please be coherent and analytical.

If you use any graphics from the internet or templates of any kind in your project, please include a list of your sources in a note on Blackboard.

get ready for photoshop

It will♫come in like a wrecking ball♫ if you are totally new to Photoshop — i.e. if you have never used this application before. We will have some homework assignments to help build Photoshop skills, but I would suggest going through some tutorials on your own before next week.