joshuagomez81

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First Shot

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Photo of the Week #2 (3 of 3) - Our Choice

I look at this every single day as I leave from home to go anywhere, it wasn’t until I was looking for formal elements that I noticed the balance, unity and variety that sits right in front of me. I have seen many people move in and out of these apartments but this view never changed. The mailboxes have been the same, the cable antennas, the trash cans, and the buildings, yet they are not all the same.

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Photo of the Week #2 (2 of 3) - Our Choice

I have always been fascinated by mechanical and man made items, one of the most interesting items to me are watches. Especially “automatic” watches which don't have a battery and are powered by movement. Then on the other side there is a fully digital watch that is powered by a battery. The items in the photo focus a lot on time so I took a long exposure, a full 1 minute exposure to be exact.

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Trent Parke was born in 1971 and was born in Australia, more specifically in Newcastle, New South Wales. He is currently the only Australian photographer that is represented by Magnum and is known as a street photographer.

I believe the photo I chose is a good representation of his style of photography, especially based on the quote that he said which is “I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.” His photo has a large amount of different levels of grays and is a photo of a small city in New South Wales called Nimbin.

           He has won many different awards and has had his entire Minutes to Midnight collection exhibited at National Gallery of Australia in 2006. He also won the World Press Photo Award in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2005. He even wrote 2 books.

Abbas was born in 1944 and based in Paris. He focused a lot on the political and social life of conflicted countries. He travelled throughout the world in his sixty-year career. He travelled to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa and the Middle East for a few examples.

           The photo I chose was based on the fact that both photos (The one by Trent Parke and Abbas) both are essentially snapshots, neither of their photos look planned and are mainly candid. They also both focus on capturing what is going in that moment. They also are very similar based on their quotes on their Magnum biography’s. Abbas’ quote says “Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder.” He has been a part of Magnum Photography since 1981.

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Photo of the Week #3 - Poetically Shooting

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Scavenger Hunt #2 - Two Focal Points

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Photo of the Week #2 (1 of 3) - Our Choice

There are a couple of reasons as to why I took this photo, the first reason being I love textures and looking at them. It is something that most people don’t really pay attention to, they usually feel them but they don’t really pay much more attention than that. I am not saying that I look at all textures because I don’t, one of the common textures that people overlook, including me, are the textures on steering wheels. This is part of my steering wheel in my truck, it is a 24 year old truck that has been through most of Texas. This steering wheel has been used for 180,000+ miles and it looks the part. But there are many textures on this steering wheel, 1 layer of abused leather, and a rubber under-layer that has also been destroyed and finally the bottom metal layer of the actual steering wheel.

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Scavenger Hunt #2 - Monochromatic Composition

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Word Puzzle - Stop, do not litter!

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Photo of the Week - Formal Elements: Texture and Emphasis

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Boring

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Geometric Shapes

The reason I chose this composition was based on how everything was positioned. I planned on taking the photo more from the left side but the cameras didn't really feel as if they were watching anything near the camera and didn't give a sense of them watching. I also aligned the photo to get the bricks to line up with the frame of the camera. The structure on the right side of the frame was a choice since it is lower than the camera and makes the camera feel higher up.

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Scavenger Hunt #1 - Shoot Something Upside Down

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Digital Darkroom #3 - Split Tone

I did not really mess with the black and white photo a lot, I really like the way it came out, the only change that I did make was lower the brightness in the clouds to increase the visibility of them. I did like how the yellow letters of F and E are brighter and the break up this line of letters, they are also very similar looking so it made it even cooler.

For the split tone colors that I chose I wanted to “flip” the colors of the building and the sky. So I did, I made the highlights like a faded red and the shadows based on a blue. 

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Scavenger Hunt #2 - Complimentary Composition

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Digital Darkroom #2 - Cropping

For the second darkroom assignment I chose this photograph of a BMW Motorcycle. Although there is not a complex background behind the motorcycle there is a lot of complex designs and details on the motorcycle itself. The first step that I took was increasing the brightness in the shadows, I did this to bring out the complexity that was hidden within the frame and motor of the motorcycle. Now that the photograph is ready I did my crops. I did choose my crops carefully and each crop has a reason.

The first crop, which is the same aspect ration as the original photo, focuses mainly on the bike. It forces you to focus on the details of the bike, the curves the straight lines, the materials, the complex frame, and the overall design.

The second crop, which is a 1 to 1 aspect ratio a.k.a. a square, focuses mainly on the stickers, which tell a story of the rider. The owner uses this bike for what it was designed for, adventure. The storage boxes that are attached to the motorcycle are not common on a lot of bikes, these are designed for long distance traveling on motorcycles and not for show. The stickers themselves tell a story of how much the owner drove the motorcycle, there are stickers of Route 66 from different states and other types of stickers.

The third and final crop, which has a tilt, is an attempt to capture the first two crops into one. It is also a way for me to introduce this fast motion that is thought about when thinking about motorcycles. It was also an experiment of extreme angles on photos that I have taken.

[joshuagomez81]

The Colorful Mr. Eggleston - Taken sometime within 1965-1974, this photograph shows the molding of a building decorated with Christmas lights. What makes this photograph interesting is the fact that this is still commonplace for businesses to do even after 45+ years. However, I’m not talking about the fact that places put up lights FOR Christmas. What I am talking about is leaving up the lights through the year, based on the photo being warm and bright and the sky being a vast blue ocean without any clouds, the odds of this photo being taken during or around summer are high. Not many people want to be setting up Christmas lights every year for a month or two then remove then and do it over and over, it is such a mundane task, so as many do they just leave them up. That is what I believe Mr. Eggleston was trying to capture, the laziness of wanting to put up lights repeatedly.