VisualAssignments1550 – Assignment Bank

A Dark Valentine

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“Use one of your favorite poems as inspiration for a poster. Edit an image or create your own background using any photo editing software, add the poem, and make sure the background exemplifies the poems message. Get creative and have fun!”

https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/poetry-art/

Alright, please bear in mind my history. Today was the first day that I edited a photo in a software besides google doc image options.

First things first, (i’m the realest), I choose a poem. This was pretty easy. I am the kind of person to have a favorite poem, but a favorite poem that is not by an easily recognizable poet. Missed You. is actually by a student who went to UMW. I saw this poem in the aubade when I toured here and never forgot it. So we got the poem.

Now, we need some kind of poster idea. When I read this poem the thing that sticks out is the candle and the fact that they are in darkness. I originally wanted to play around with the darkness and found/edited this background.

Then I wanted to add the candle image.

So I found this photo of dripping candles.

This is where the photo editing software came in. I used Photopea, which is free by the way, and it was honestly a little overwhelming at first, but I just played around. I tried to make both the dark weave background and the candles work together, but it just wasn’t really working, so I scraped the dark background and went with just the candles.

I cut out around them so that it looked like this. Yes, I kept the little dots around them, that was on purpose because I thought that it looked cool.

I then formatted the words a little so that they fit around the parts of the photo I left.

Now I had this. I thought I was done, but as I put this photo at the top of the blog, I realized that the bottom part was really empty. So I went back and did some simple Google Doc image re-arranging and got this.

As I was writing this, I thought about changing the background color. I present this alternate version with a black background.

I like this version better so I am officially changing it. This is the final version.

Do I love the finished product? Not exactly. Am I proud of it? Yes. Definitely. I did something new and accomplished a not-half-bad end goal. From here, there is nowhere to go but up. And I can take solace in that fact.

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Visual Assignment: Poetry Art

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For this assignment I Wanted to use the Poem Parody I wrote last week as inspiration for the art I made this week. Really I just took an image of some lemon ricotta pancakes I made, then blurred the image behind my poem, and this is the finished result:

Poem Parody:Stopping by IHop on a Snowy Evening Poem Parody:Stopping by IHop on a Snowy Evening Whose Cakes these are? of sweetened dough. His house is internationally known; He will leave the ketchup here and watch me fill my mouth with Potatoes. My family must think it queer To eat my pancakes with root beer But If they’re serving it to me I can’t be blamed for what happens here I give my waiter a fat tip Because the service industries a rip The only way to make some dough Is sueing IHOP for a broken hip The meal was lovely, fast and cheap Now time to get back in the jeep There’s miles to go before we sleep and many other meals to eat.

This assignment was really light and enjoyable, much like the pancakes, and I got a laugh out of revisiting this post so all in all I liked this one, I would definitely revisit this assignment.

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Inspirational Poetry

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After reading about storytelling and better photography techniques, I chose to make sure the background for this photo matched the message it was sending. I wanted the photo to send the same message as the poem. Colorful, inspirational, and sending love to others is the message I hope to send.

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Poetry is in the eye of the Beholder

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I enjoy reading a lot. So for my first assignment bank assignment I did poetry art.

When I read anything with sub-tones of imagery, I can visualize the words taking form through my imagination. The things I see in my head I know are unique to how I visualize things coming together in the poem. In Edgar Allen Poe’s sonnet “Silence” he uses the visualization of a sea and shore along with imagery of light and dark, but he goes out of his way to clarify it is not good and evil. I always end up picturing a sunset because to me sunsets represent the ending of a cycle and the start of a new one.

For the assignment we had to come up with a poster for our poem. This is what I ended up with:

Poems and other written art manifest themselves in different ways for each person reading them. This poem speaks to me because I see it as a representative of light and dark. So, even if for me this poem has a shore with light and dark, for someone else it could have an entirely different meaning. Let me know what you think of when you read this poem!

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Poetry Art

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For my other Visual Assignment, I decided to do “Poetry Art”. I liked the idea of doing a visual assignment that wasn’t photography, and I love poetry (even though I can’t really write it).

My poem poster ended up as:

I picked Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” because it’s one of my favorites, and it’s a very visual poem. The images conjured are very vivid, and lent themselves to the pictures I incorporated. I also enjoy the visual effect of the italics – a writing choice that makes a bold statement visually.

I tried to make it visually interesting without being too tacky, because I didn’t want to trivialize the poem. It’s still a little cheesy, and I feel kinda bad about that, but I was limited by the availability of free images.

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Assignment Bank 5 #DS106 (4 star)

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I did “Poetry Art” in the Visual area this time.

Now I know it’s a dark poem, however I prefer poems with meaning even though I love to fantasize and be creative all the time. I don’t know I guess I’m just weird, and you can only take so much fantasy.

Now go ahead give it a try, no ones gonna judge you for trying and it’ll be great, maybe you’ll find a friend along the way.

If you want to try it yourself and do way better than I did, you can find it here, http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/poetry-art/

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“What is it you plan to do with your one and precious life?”

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As soon as I read the description for this assignment, I knew exactly what poem I was going to pick! I love the poet Mary Oliver. My girlfriend ( who ironically enough, took this class and her assignment was the example pictured in the assignment description) told me about Mary Oliver a few months ago and since then I’ve been reading a lot of her poems. Most notably I like her pieces that deal with nature and also one’s that talk about death.

I chose the ending of this poem, but the actual poem is a lot longer. I love the ending line “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life”? The picture I chose is one I took that was really beautiful and that captured a perfect example of what it is in life that I love the most.

When I created this image I actually just used a word document. I was having a little bit of trouble adding text in my photo editing software so I had the idea to upload the picture in word and then I put a text box over top of the picture. I then screen-shotted the picture and uploaded it into my photo editor, cropped it and saved it. The result is the picture below! Great assignment, fun idea!

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Visual Poetry

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For this visual assignment I had to use my favorite poem and put it on top of an image that describes the poem. I decided to use The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and found an image that I thought described the poem. I changed the saturation, temperature, and contrast of the image to make it look more yellow and put the words on top of it.

I enjoyed this assignment but had some trouble getting the final image to be big enough to read the text. It’s probably small because I used Microsoft Word to put the words on top of the picture and then screenshotted it because I couldn’t save it as a picture and, therefore, had to screenshot it to be able to save it as a jpeg file. In order to screenshot it I had to make the page small enough to see everything. Even though I’m not as happy with the output as I thought I was gonna be, I still enjoyed reading my favorite poem again and making it visual.

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Visual Assignment: Poetry Art (3 pts)- “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”- Sebastian Crane and Lawrence Spitler

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For this character collaboration post, I chose to make a picture that contained not only the words from a poem, but the visual created by those words. The poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” is one I have read and seen at different times of my life and I wanted to make something dedicated to this poem. This visual shows how the death of Sebastian Crane greatly affected Lawrence Spitler.

Initially, I wanted a post where both characters were the same age, but I was so interested in Tiffany’s present-day character that I decided to come up with a story for how they know one another. By 2015, Sebastian would be 90 years old and Lawrence is in his 30s, so I had them be neighbors. When they first encountered each other, Lawrence thought Sebastian was just a senile old man, yet Sebastian saw himself in him and wanted to know more about him. So to initiate the conversations, Sebastian once put a letter from his mailbox into Lawrence’s (Sebastian still played his tricks, but these were not malicious) so that he would come to deliver it and he could try to talk to him more. Lawrence was still closed off, yet one night a man tried to break into Sebastian’s car and Lawrence scared him off. To thank Lawrence, Sebastian invited him over for a beer. Soon enough, Lawrence began visiting Sebastian’s house a several days a week and Sebastian brought out the best in Lawrence, as he was the most honest about his feelings when he was with Sebastian. Although they did have arguments about Lawrence’s lifestyle, Lawrence loved Sebastian like his own father and Sebastian like another son. They grow close to one another to a point where Lawrence sees him as the father figure he never really had after his own father passed when he was so young. Sebastian would tell Lawrence all about his life, from how he once was cold, but because of his loving wife Sasha and his brother Donovan, he was able to show his golden heart to all those he met. He once told Lawrence that “You cannot see light without walking through a field shadows. The light, the good, is waiting to be seized by you. Because every good and bad thing happens for a reason. We need the bad to know what good really is; to know what what is worth fighting for and what things can be left behind.” Sebastian saw himself in Lawrence from the moment they met and that was why he wanted the best for Lawrence and encouraged him to make better decisions or have more of an open heart. Lawrence drove Sebastian to the hospital when he had a severe stroke and stayed with him until the end. Before he passed on, he told Lawrence that he made the last years of his life better and that Lawrence would never be alone. At Sebastian’s funeral, Lawrence spoke of the man who showed him towards a new light and soon, he was the only one standing in front of his grave. He remembered Sebastian reciting the poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” once when they were on his porch as he told Lawrence that the poem helped him cope with the losses of his father, Donovan, and Sasha. He told Lawrence that he believed the spirit does not stay at the grave, rather they stay beside those they love, like a guardian angel. Since then, Lawrence had a change of heart because of Sebastian and he sought to do better for himself and others.

To make this photo, I combined a picture of an angel statue and one of two men walking beside one another on Pixlr and used Powerpoint to add the text (which took a very long time figuring out how to do because of the color of the text). After, I adjusted the color of the final photo to make the poem stand out more.

I chose the angel statue because it represented the idea of a grave and in this particular post, Sebastian passes away and serves to be Lawrence’s guardian angel. For the picture of the two men walking together, I wanted this to be a picture of Sebastian and Lawrence going for a walk, showing their closeness to one another.

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Unit 5

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Telling Stories in Photos

I listened first to photographer Jason Eskenazi’s video on the art of using photography as a method of storytelling. I never thought of the idea of changing a 3D world to a 2D world – the words “clean, simple, direct” are often not associated with art. We try to pack things with so much meaning that I think sometimes people try to make it =too= obvious what they are trying to say, instead of leaving “mystery” as Mr. Eskenazi says, and letting people come up with their own ideas about what the photo means. Geometry, repetition of form – all this goes to the idea of seeking the right imagery in 2-D form. I definitely related to his idea of trying to find images that “don’t have things sticking out of people’s heads”. Those kinds of awkward juxtapositions often screw up what I think are really good pictures. The problem ends up being that it works on one plain, but not on another.

The Story Behind a Photo

It’s fascinating to read what Dorothea Lange went through to get this iconic image. (I love reading about how things like this are created or come together – there are always so many “what if’s” that could have turned out another way). What struck me most about the story was Lange’s patience(it took almost a month) as well as the fact that she trusted her gut at the most crucial moment – when she saw the sign for the pea pickers camp and went back find the migrant family one last time). The obvious answer to the first question posed by ds106 is that if Lange had had access to a blog at the time she took the photo, she would have been able to share her story of hardship at the time the photo was taken. That story, accompanying the image, may have helped drive home the desperate state of affairs facing the migrant families at that time. On the other hand, if she was able to blog and send photos out in real time, she may =not= have felt the need to stay on the road for so long, Considering the fact that social media seems to shorten peoples’ attention span for any one topic, it’s reasonable to assume that she may have “maxxed” out her audience’s appetite for this story well before she ever got around to taking the iconic photo. As for the question of whether there’s more to a photo that just the image, the answer is: of course. As we see in many of recent American history’s most iconic images, the people or things in the actual photo often stand for something much larger – becoming conduits for an emotion attached to a larger issue. For the migrant photo, it was the plight of the working poor. For the photo of a Vietnamese man being shot in the head, it was the frustration over the Vietnam War. For the picture of firefighters raising a flag at Ground Zero, it was the sadness and patriotism that followed the 9/11 attacks.

It can also spur social or political change – both the Vietnam and migrant photos can be seen as a catalysts for social activism.

Becoming Better Photographers

I learned about composition and contrast a long time ago – the idea of having something in the frame that you are focused on makes it easier to compose (rather than trying to jam a bunch of stuff into the picture with no clear emotional center). I believe the advice regarding use of lens, aperture and shutter speed is becoming more and more of an art as people turn to automatic phone cameras and move away from manual ones. I would like to learn more about this – I’m sure expertise when it comes to lens, etc. can help set my pictures apart.

Lectures about photography

Watching the D106 lectures about photography, I was intrigued by the advice to shift the point of view (the horizon for example)… Also, it was helpful to see the difference in playing with the exposure… I’m definitely going to try the effect of using a slower shutter speed to capture the long strings of street lights… I would also like to crop my photos more – manipulate pictures after the fact. I loved the fascinating examples of how to shoot from different angles, use different light, look for unusual images…

Commenting on others’ blogs

I must admit I am still not comfortable tweeting to people about their blogs (trying to comment with a digital trail via #d106). Once I do it, I somehow find myself waiting for an avalanche of tweets from the recipient and the rest of the blogoshpere asking why I’m wasting everyone’s time and I’m doing it wrong besides. That said, I reached out to various people on our d106 blog list – Kimber Mattox (who favorited my tweet), GoodNews/Seventh Self (I could only comment through wordpress – twitter link was busted), Lucid Dreams (again through wordpress), Virtually Foolproof (which included an interesting discussion of licensing creative work on d106) and Andre’s crazy blog.

PhotoBlitz

So, in order, I took pictures showing an interesting shadow/reflection, my cat’s paw, a photo that doesn’t look like a photo, a photo dominated by a single color, a photo of two things that don’t belong together, a photo of an object that looks more supernatural, a photo from an unusual angle and a photo emphasizing light/dark tones. Hey – 8 out of 15 ain’t bad! I enjoyed this project, although I realized after the fact that I didn’t use my camera’s settings to mix up the look – i.e. sepia tone, black and white, etc. That said, I enjoyed going on the hunt through my house, paying special attention to light, color and shadows – basically a different look at things I see every day. Uploaded to Flickr with the “ds106photoblitz” tag – and commented on a few photos with that tag.

Visual Assignments

This is visual assignment #1 – a warning poster. Took a few shots of my son right after he came home from school and this was the best one. I asked him what he thought we should do a warning poster on – first he said smoking, then he said ISIS. I opted for something sillier. (3 stars) (VisualAssignments1549)

This is visual assignment #2 – poetry art. Tricky figuring out how to manipulate text over the image, but I think it worked out. The poem is by one of my favorite poets – Charles Bukowski, although its difficult finding poems that aren’t dark. This one barely qualifies as not dark. (3 stars) (VisualAssignments1550)

This is visual assignment #3 – taking a common everyday object and manipulating the color. For this, I ended up using Picadilo – a free photo editing online program that doesn’t require you to register or anything. The picture is of my coffee cup from earlier in the day. I bookmarked Picadilo – it is a program worth exploring further. (2 stars) (VisualAssignments107)

This is visual assignment #4 – Normal to Extraordinary. I played with Picadilo again. Gotta love this program. (3 stars) (VisualAssignments102)

Summary

I found this unit to be fascinating and extremely helpful. I found myself driving to work this morning, catching the contrast of colors on the street signs, looking at the light trails and checking shadows. The photoblitz in particular helped give me a new perspective on everyday objects. I also took a lot away from the lectures on taking pictures – the details to pay attention to, etc. It gave me hope that just because everyone has a camera now, it doesn’t mean that you can’t still take an extraordinary photo if you take the time to compose it and are patient enough to wait for those extraordinary moments to present themselves.