Thursday, October 11, 2012

Photo Essay: William Pei (42852684) & James Stubbs Grigoriou (42797411)




Theme: Light
Sub-Theme: Artificial Light


We chose artificial light as our theme because we believe it epitomizes the concept of ‘everydayness’. Everydayness is the idea that by focusing on the things around us, exploring the mundane through photography, we can capture things the human eye fails to see. An everyday image is defined by Susan Murray in her article Digital Images, Photo Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics as: “the types of images that we can create or engage with on a regular basis that evoke or reference the more ordinary or frequent moments of our lives” (2008, p. 151).

Light is a necessity in our world, mans ability to control light is one of his greatest achievements, one which modern society is based around. We found it intriguing that something so pivotal could also be so mundane. As humans we fear the darkness, the unknown. We increased blacks/shadows in editing to increase the contrast between the lights and surrounding darkness to emphasize this idea. We also increased the contrast and saturation of the pictures to add to this effect.  We used cross fades for slide transitions to give the feeling as though each slide was a light being turned on.

The music was chosen due to its ambient and electric feel. We thought this fitted in nicely with artificial lights. It was also selected because of it’s haunting sound for the second half of the video.  We accompanied this haunting sound with images outside the house, images that expressed a feeling of isolation and darkness; this was intended to be in contrast to the bright photos at the beginning of the clip (which were much lighter cheerier). We also slowed down the video in the second half to accentuate the unsettling feeling of the pictures/music.


Bibliography

Music- "The Flight (496 Km)" by Vulturius Maestus
Available at: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/513480/vulturius-maestus-the-flight-496-km
Published under a creative commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ accessed 11/10/2012

Murray, S (2008) Digital Image, Photo Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics in Journal of Visual Culture Vol 7(2) pp. 147-163.

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