I decided to just walk around my apartment complex since that is a very common place that I see multiple times a day. I usually use my Minolta manual camera but it was in a friend’s car so I had to use my iPhone but I still think they came out alright.
I created this visual using pixlr express app on my iPhone. I photographed some objects, uploaded it to my pixlr express station and started playing around with some awesome layers and filters. I had a lot fun with this application, and I’m still learning more about it.
For this assignment i took my creativity to another level, I used saturation, lighting, contrast, and even effects from both pixlr and my photo-bucket account to make these ten objects look totally abstract ad unfamiliar. The ten objects that I chose below are Aunt Jemima’s Syrup, Red Devil Hot Sauce, Hand Sanitizer, Nyquil, Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix Box, Dawn Anti-Bacterial Dishwasher Soap, Onions in a basket, A loaf of Bread, Parmesan Cheese, and Jif Peanut Butter. After setting the contrasts and lighting in different versions that people aren’t use to seeing i decided to form all of the pictures int a collage using the website mycollage.com. I chose to do this so that my audience could actually see all of the pictures at once and take closer looks at each picture once they click it. I chose to set the background yellow because if you change it to a darker background it would take away the effects and lighting’s on the pictures. This process was very fun i enjoyed fooling around with the lighting effects and tools to make these objects look unreal and deformed. “CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GET A CLOSER LOOK”!
The Ds106 Assignment- Mission: Defamiliarize
Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc.–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.
For this assignment I selected some of my photogragphy assignments and some daily photos that I took randomly. Personaly I like the extreme closeup most, you can see from the “flower” “wall” and “light” pictures. I didn’t use photoshop for most pictures. When I took these pictures I adjusted the shutter speed to get slow motion photo. By the way you need a tripod to take pictures at night or under the dark light.
Mission Defamiliarize was my favorite assignment! I enjoyed taking everyday items and photographing them in a way that portrays them as unfamiliar items. The first picture is of my kitchen cabinets, taken from an angle underneath them and then I tweaked the coloring by using the night vision option in Picnik.
The second picture is of my dishwasher in my kitchen. I zoomed in extremely close to the grate and tilted the camera trying to create an angle that would add to the mystery of the object. I also changed the exposure of the image on Picnik as well, creating a darker picture.
The third picture is of the stools in my kitchen. This picture was the most effective in terms of the initial photographing. I didn’t have to tweak much because I was so pleased with the way it initially came out.
The fourth picture is probably my favorite one, it’s my coffee pot. I took a picture of the side where the numbers indicating the right amount of water are listed. I then uploaded it to Picnik and changed the coloring.
The fifth picture is the latch on my window in the kitchen. I chose to photograph this particularly because it’s not an object people are usually familiar with so the latch in all it’s simplicity is already half-way to being defamiliarized. That being said I didn’t too much to this photo after I took it.
The sixth picture is a birds-eye view of the light-switches in my kitchen. I thought this was kind of clever because typically people down look down on light-switches. If you’re anything like me, you don’t even look at them, just absentmindedly flick them.
The seventh picture is of the shelf in my dining room. It has a candle holder (with the candle in it), part of a pumpkin decoration, and the rim of a sombrero in the picture. I took it intentionally so the focus of the picture would be the empty shelf in the middle of all these other unidentifiable objects.
The eighth picture is the surface of one of my favorite games, catch phrase. It was sitting in the kitchen so I tried to take an elusive picture. All I did after taking it was change it to black and white.
The ninth picture is of a candle at an angle in a candle holder in the shape of many intertwined hearts. I used the duo-tone option in Picnik to edit this photo but it ended up looking very similar to the sepia option which would have required less effort on my part.
Last but not least the tenth picture is a sleeve of oreos that I uploaded into Picnik and posterized giving it the painted look.
I’m interested to what everybody else thought these pictures were of! I asked my sister prior to composing this post and she couldn’t guess a single one!
In the months before my semester in Spain, I was on a mission to document every mundane detail of my daily life as a student in Minneapolis. Even though I didn’t expect the photos to be very interesting, I knew from my time in Australia that no matter where you’re living, eventually you get used to your environment and stop paying attention to the little things. I was determined not to let this happen in Spain, so for the 90 days before I left for Europe, I photographed everything.
What surprised me from this experiment was how refreshing it is to try and view your familiar surroundings in a completely new way. I felt like a child, seeing everything for the first time. The above photo is an example of this—a beautiful discovery that I would never had seen if I hadn’t been on the lookout for novelty.
Now, several years after that experiment, I’m back in a state where everything is routine and familiar again. So when I came across the “Mission: Defamiliarize” assignment for ds106, I realized that it’s time for me to change how I see my surroundings.
For the first of these photo missions, I chose to focus on one of my favorite places: the Minneapolis Central Library. Not only is the building itself a work of art, but where else can you find free knowledge, natural sunlight, and amazing coffee all in the same place? So of course, I spend a lot of time there.
I spent part of a Sunday afternoon wandering around the library with my camera, taking note of details I’d never noticed and searching for unfamiliar vantage points. The library was busy, so I was very self-conscious for the first few photos. After all, it’s hard to blend in when you’re repeatedly taking photos of the ceiling… Soon enough, though, the excitement of new discovery outweighed the awkwardness, and I was down on my hands and knees, photographing the carpet.
And now, the results of the Defamiliarize: Minneapolis Central Library Misson
The assignment was to take a ten photos of a familiar place and make it unfamiliar, what place is more familiar than home? The process was very simple, I just wandered around my house taking pictures at different angles until I had ten and then uploaded it as a set on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/74662679@N02/sets/72157629295197453/
DS106 Assignment – Mission: Defamiliarize
Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc.–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.
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A snowy Sunday afternoon, too cold to go outside for photography. So I snapped pix around the house for this Defamiliarize assignment. All the pictures are familiar objects from inside my house.
After shooting, I collected all the photos together, along with some others I’d taken recently. I selected the ones I wanted to keep. I kept more than the specified ten though.
I converted all the pictures to black and white. Then I played with brightness and contrast settings in a photo editor until I got an interesting effect.
I uploaded everything to a Flickr Set, and grabbed the embed code from Flickr to paste into my blog. Here’s the link to Flickr if the embedded slide show doesn’t work.
That’s my story. Any questions?
The assignment was to take 10 photos of a place familiar to you and make it seem foreign. The following were pictures around my house…
I was hoping to do a public place, however I ended up doing my house. The pictures are from various rooms. I messed with the hue and color corrections to give it a different foreign feel to it – a way i’m not used to seeing my house.
Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc.–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.
See an example at http://www.andessurvivor.com/2012/01/23/mission-defamiliarize/
