Ireland's Artist Statement

   Starting this year out, I had little hope that I would enjoy the photography class. I honestly had just signed up for it because I needed a year long class to fill one of my blocks. I had never really had any interest in taking photos other than when I would see pretty flowers or the sun looked good during the night a few times. I had never really owned a high tech camera, or honestly any camera at all. I would always just use my phone. After the 2nd semester started, I had suddenly begin enjoying this class because I had actually gone out and got myself a nice DSLR to take pictures that I would be proud of and want to keep and print out. Throughout the year, I had some favorite assignments, and some not so enjoyable assignments. Two assignments throughout this year that I enjoyed the most had to be these last two. Those are the Portrait assignment, where I had to take pictures of others and myself and really show who they were as a person, and the Nature assignment, where you can assume that it was taking good pretty pictures of things that are naturally around us every day. For both of these assignments, I worked with people and threw ideas back and forth of what we should do for every photo; the angle, the sun position, what height to take it, ect. For every assignment, I used another person because it's better for me to think that way. I think the reason that I liked that assignments closer to the end of the year the best is because we had a lot more freedom on what we could do and could plan out how to do it.

 
  In my sophomore year, I had my fair share of good and bad photos and assignments. One of my not so good photo shoots had to have been the Noun assignment. The assignment was to jumble two nouns and try to make them work together, then take 30 pictures incorporating them together. My two nouns that I decided to do were unusual and beauty. My thinking was that I would take pictures of things that weren't thought of to be pretty or beautiful but when you get close to it and take a better look, you could see how pretty they were. Now obviously that didn't work out considering I'm writing about how bad I was at that assignment. I think the reason it didn't work out so well is because the ideas juxtaposed each other too much. I had taken pictures of things like bugs, trees, and rocks. They ended up turning out nice looking, but they didn't match the theme of the actual assignment. One of my much better assignments was the nature photo shoots was the nature one. I enjoy taking pictures of things that occur in nature, and almost everything in nature can be beautiful if you look at it right. For my nature photos, my favorite had to be of the one with the flower on my wrist. We had to find something that had veins, yet couldn't use a flower. I was thinking and I realized, that, technically humans are a part of nature. In this photo, I really think that is showed my voice more than any other photos I've taken this year. It connects myself to nature and ended up looking very nice.

    Personally, I think my voice is like many other teenage girls these days. All teenage girls think that sunsets are pretty, flowers are cute, and animals are adorable. I think the only difference between my voice and all the other girls is that I think about the affect of things on photos. I took the photo of my cat in front of the mirror because I gives your more than a view of just one side of the photo. Like I've said before, a lot of my influences come from nature. I don't know why it fascinates me so much to be honest. I plan on going into the field of animal medicine, so the anatomy and the looks of animals always seem cool to me, and have since I was around 5. I want people to look at my art and say "Hey! That's cool!" and want to go take pictures of similar things.

 

    As the year has gone by, I have begun to realize what I'm decent at, great at, and just plain old suck at doing. Some of my strengths are being able to set up photos, lighting, and just getting the right angle. My weaknesses are probably just the basics. I'm not a fan of following the correct way to take "The perfect picture". I just kind of do whatever. And usually, I like how it turns out! I'm glad I took this course because it showed me that I actually have an interest in digital art. 

Nature Photo Hunt

For this assignment, we were told to do a scavenger hunt to find different things that are naturally made. For one of the things to look for, you had to find something with veins, but could do a leaf. I had no idea what else has veins in it, so I realized that technically, us humans are a part of nature. I sat a flower onto my wrist in a way where the vein would look like the stem. I thought that maybe it would connect nature to the human body, and I also thought it would be very creative.

Digital Panorama

I drove out to a tiny town outside of anderson and found that there were a bunch of silos in that town. In Indiana, you find silos everywhere. I thought that this might help show who I am and where I came from. I set the scene up by aligning the shadows in a was that showed contract on the silos. I made sure not to center the photo, as well as making sure I had a few contrasting agricultural things in the background. My weakness was probably the photoshopping. Im not too proud of it because it is really messy, but it was very hard to try to fill in all the empty space.

DOF Photoshoot Reflection

For this photoshoot, I drove to Forest Park here in Noblesville because I knew that this area would have a lot of spaces that would lend itself to depth of field. I set up my different scenes by just walking around and paying attention to every detail my eyes could pick out and trying to configure them into a nice image. 

I did my best use of the elements by trying to not center many photos throughout the shoot. It helped the pictures have a better view of depth of field and allowed your eyes to view the whole picture and not just what was in front of you.

My main subject matter gravitated towards more trails than any other thing. I also enjoyed taking photos that involved a lot of fallen leaves with different shades and colors which allowed me to speak my voice. Fall is my favorite season so it was easy to incorporate my voice into each photo. I was able to view the world differently by getting low to the ground and scanning my eyes out all over the background instead of just staring at was directly in front of my eyes.

My strength of this photoshoot was the ability I had to be able to navigate through Forest Park and finding the best areas to take pictures of due to my many years of having gone there and memorizing the park. My weakness had to have been the fact that I was using my phone camera instead of a real camera. Another thing would have to be since it was still cold, I had a little trouble from keeping still and not letting my hands shake like the rest of me. 

Shutter Speed Photoshoot Reflection

For this photoshoot I asked my boyfriend, Alexander, if he would help me with the "modeling" part of these photos. In most of the photos, he is tossing around a soccer ball and juggling with his feet. I had him help me with the soccer ball part because he is on my soccer team with me, therefore, he knows how to actually do cool tricks with the soccer ball. We went over to the field behind the park of my neighborhood that is also in front of a large pond. To set up this scene, I told Alex to just kick around the ball and feel natural as if I weren't sitting there taking pictures of him.

The element I used to create the image above was to focus on the main point of your image. It helped me able to get a clear and crisp picture of him and the moving ball.

I chose the soccer ball and my boyfriend as my subjects because they both are huge parts of my life and mean a lot to me. Soccer has been apart of my life for eleven years and I have been with my boy friend for a year and a half. This photoshoot helped me look at the world differently by seeing how much faster some things move than others, which was a new thing for me.

My strength in this assignment was being able to have someone who knows how to kick a soccer ball properly be my model. It would've been much harder if I had used someone with little to no experience with soccer. My weakness of this photoshoot probably had to be the fact I was using my phone as my camera unlike all the others who use a real professional camera.

Color Composition Reflection

The picture above is my favorite that I took out of the thirty images I had to take for our color assignment in Photography. In our assignment, I took pictures of different subjects, including pumpkins, fire, and antiques. I went to Dale hollow for vacation where I took a few photos, The farmers market that had their fair selection of pumpkins, and also went to this huge antique mall in Westfield, Indiana. This antique store had a huge selection of every color you could imagine, along with having unique pieces to look at and capture photos of. I put different shades of orange up against different contrasting colors to get the images that I have now, causing them to look better than just with a boring background. I used my elements to avoid distractions and I was able to keep multiple pictures out of the center of the photo. My ability to use the elements allowed my pictures to look much better and have a higher quality of photography than if I were to just point and shoot random images of orange objects. I had multiple subjects, all very hard to choose which was my favorite. I used only things that I find a big part in my life to take photos of. Like I took a photo of an old school orange crush sign, which happened to be my favorite drink as a child. Before this assignment, I never really looked at all of the colors we have in everything, there is a huge range of colors in our long life that we never take the time to appreciate. My weakness was trying to find a lot of orange. I had immediately thought about the orange leaves, but they hadn't quite turned orange just yet. I would have changed my color for this assignment because orange is actually a lot more difficult to find than you would think.

The Future...

In the future, I see that people will be able to take pictures of what is happening just with blinking their eye or moving a certain muscle. Instead of having to actually pull out a device and push a button, you will be able to take a picture in half of a second and be able to store it in your mind or a device. Your body will become a real time camera with the most HD photos ever created.