In a world where everything has gone dark, the animals start to attack. Even the cute little rabbits and squirrels are bound to rip your face off. What caused the world to end up this way?

All you can remember is a flash of light. When you look at your phone all you see is this photo. You can barely make out what it is. Is this the cause of the end of the world?

For this assignment I had to create a before and after of an apocalyptic scene. My mom has a backyard full of plastic animals so I immediately knew that I wanted to work with them somehow. I first had to decide which of the many creatures that I was going to choose. I decided on the rabbit with the squirrel in the background because they are both fairly docile and innocent creatures so making them evil and dangerous would be interesting,

I then went into my photo editor and only made two changes that made a huge difference. I reddened the eyes and darkened the photo. It is crazy how those two things changed the scene entirely.  I then went into Juxtapose and put the two photos together. The Juxtapose site is made by Knightlab which I have used before for other tools. I had never heard of this one before so I will definitely try to use it again.

For the second half of this assignment I chose to do the blackmail assignment.  I had a hard time deciding what exactly to take the photo of. I then thought about my story line. I already made this apocalyptic world that has gotten darker and wanted to play with the mystery aspect of it. What if nobody knew what had happened? I thought about the difference between dark and light so I decided to take a blurry photo of a set of light switches. I brightened the photo a whole lot and played with contrast. Something I enjoy about this photo is that from certain angles it looks like it is pure white, but depending how you look at it you can see the switches.

I enjoy how these images look like they have nothing in common but because I have created a story they make sense, at least to me. This was a really fun assignment that allowed me to think outside the box and tell a story of my own.

There have been several assignments that I have commented on saying I would like to work on it again or change something, and I’m glad we were given that opportunity this week! During week four, I worked on the Juxtapose assignment (VisualAssignment2172), which shows either a person or thing that has survived the apocalypse. You can see my original creation and post here. This is not one of the assignments I immediately wanted to redo, but I later realized that I 1) could embed the Juxtapose into my post, rather than linking it, and 2) the effect would be better if I was in a similar position. Below is a screenshot of my original one (I cannot embed it because the code is long lost).

I liked the green lighting and change in expression, but I was in no way facing the same way, which is not really a juxtapose. I also put the after picture on the left, which was a mistake!

For my redo, I used a sliding glass door as the background so that it would be completely white. I took the before picture in typical lighting, and smiled. In the after picture, I turned off the main lights, closed the curtain behind me, and turned on the colored lights to have a slight green effect. I liked the green color better this time because something just seems off about the lighting, rather than it looking like what it is (a green light above me).

My original goal was to perfectly align the two photos, but that did not work out with the effect I wanted in the individual pictures. I wanted the after picture to be more face-focused because that is the area that is noticeably off (well, that and my messed up hair). For the before picture, I wanted it to obviously be a happy picture that I took of myself, and those are generally zoomed out a bit more! I do think that it mostly aligns (and it took me a while to compare the many pictures I took to see which two mostly lined up and both had the effects I wanted), and I am happy with my new outcome!

Photography and Narratives:
Pictures are a great way to help tell a story through imagery and scenery that portray emotions or events.  I am excited to get into the photography portion of our course and start adding characters and conflicts to the journey through my pictures.

Visual Assignments:

I chose this assignment because I thought it would be really cool to compare what I look like before and after the apocalypse to help tell my story a little more.  Here is the product using Juxtapose:

                           http://

Your Favorite Photo?

This is my absolute favorite photo I have taken!  I love the lighting and the expression I caught in this moment on my horses face.  It is so hard to capture special moments like this and I love the way he looks in this moment! I think it helps to tell a visual story of a sunny happy day and a calm, loving animal.

So I had a lot fun with this assignment and trying to figure out how I wanted to do it. I decided to take some pictures for this assignment after I took the pictures for the Photoblitz challenge. Out in the woods, I was walking along some natural trails and looking at the old, broken-down, outside classrooms. It all looked really wild and I fell in love with it instantly! I couldn’t get any good before and after pictures for the classrooms themselves, but I was able to get a good one for the nature trails! While the pictures are not of the same spot, I did think they look super similar (enough for this assignment any way). The “before” is supposed to be a nice nature trail while the “after” is a nature trail that has been over taken and overgrown since the apocalypse.

I knew this would be an assignment that would be rough to do with our own pictures since it’s hard to make before and after pictures immediately – especially if they are of nature. I was originally just going to do pictures off the internet, but that felt more like cheating to me.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this turned out and I hope you like it too!