Assignment Tasks:
- Photograph the most diverse people that you encounter during the course of one week, then choose and submit the five photographs that you feel best express the concept of diversity.
- When submitting the photographs, include a brief written statement in Canvas where you, explain your concept of diversity, relate your experiences photographing the people, and include something you learned about them.
- Include in your written statement a brief self-evaluation of your work, essentially what did you do well and what can you do better?
There are several additional challenges for the assignment.
- At least three of the photographs must be of people you do not know.
- You must talk to the people and explain what you are doing before you photograph them,
learn at least their first name, and ask them to tell you something interesting about them that you can include in your written statement
This Photography Assignment has three tasks you must complete
- Take photographs
- Write a statement about your photos
- Participate in Peer Review of ten classmates’ photos
Assignment goals:
- Students will demonstrate skills making photographic portraits
- Students will demonstrate effective visual communications using composition in photographs
- Students will make photographs centered on their understanding of different social perspectives
*Acquire and Demonstrate Photographic Skills :
Four Lynda.psu.edu tutorials from the PHOTO 101 playlist are required watching for this assignment,
- Introduction to Photography and/or Photography 101
- Photography Foundations: Lenses
- Photography Foundations: Exposure
- Learning Portrait Photography
From these tutorials, you will receive important information, which will be important resources for completing this assignment effectively.
- Set your camera effectively for the brightness of the image (exposure)
- Choose the best lens (or zoom length) for portraits
- Make sharp focus in different lighting conditions
- Use natural light beautifully and creatively
Photographic skill is the ability to set and use the camera effectively. Controlled focus, consistent brightness or exposure, and natural color rendering are three important aspects of photographic image quality.
Demonstrating control of these aspects is important to the skills aspect of the assignment. However, developing skills require experimentation with techniques such as using manual focus and “depth of field” controls covered in the assignment tutorials.
*Develop Effective Visual Communications Capabilities:
From the tutorials Introduction to Photography and Learning Portrait Photography, you will learn the basics of composition and portraiture.
Visual composition is to photography what written composition is to literature. It is a way of organizing your photographs to create meaning that your audience can understand. It allows you to balance the ways elements interact in your pictures. For example, composition techniques will allow you to integrate the most complex backgrounds or surroundings into your portraits in an organized way and not lose the importance of the person in the portrait. With effective composition, you can let your audience know subtle or exciting things about your subjects based on their surroundings.
Composition requires your active decision to include or exclude elements from your photographs.
Composition relates to camera skills in how you use focus and “depth of field” to control where your viewer looks in your photos. It also relates to posing, expression and posture of the people in your pictures since how they pose may affect what else you decide to include in your frames. This is different from taking a quick snapshot since it will require that you look at every element in you photo frame and make compositions adjustments or choices before you push the button. Those decisions all contribute to the way you compose your pictures and what the audience takes away, understands or assumes when they see them. Recent photographic and social media history is replete with examples of photographers who made poor compositional choices that created unintended meanings.
*Develop Capacities for Social Engagement using Photography:
For this assignment, we give no definition of diversity. Instead we leave it to you to decide that for yourself. Part of the challenge of the assignment is for you to develop your own definition and explain it to us, your audience, through your images and writing.
Photography is an important visual medium for recording and expressing the drama of the human condition.
It presents photographers a way to capture the essence of what they see and share it with others. Audiences have for many years flocked to popular publications like National Geographic Magazine because they show diverse people and places. This diversity can take all kinds of forms including photographing people from different countries, national regions, religions, races, occupations, and/or cultures.
Even as social media makes the world feel smaller, the variety of diversity in culture still continues to fascinate audiences of photography.
One recent example of audience fascination with diverse people is Brandon Stanton’s popular photo blog Humans of New York. Started in 2010, Stanton intended to photograph 10,000 New Yorker, however after he began have conversations with his subjects and posting them with his photographs his project grew immensely. He now has over 18 million Facebook likes and 600,000 followers on Twitter.
Humans of New York is an example of how photography has changed due to immediate access to social media by photographers. In the past photographers, like Penn State graduate Steve McCurry, could only gain access to large audiences through magazines like National Geographic. Today those barriers are gone and photographers like you have access to worldwide audiences. If you post the photos from this assignment to Facebook or Instagram, many people, most of which you do not know, will look at and comment on your observations and experiences.
Stanton is not without his critics who have pointed out that, as the photographer, he controls the photographs, in essence we see the people through his personal lens. His visual and content choices affect the meaning of the pictures. This is the problem with “authorship.” Photographs of people by photographers are not facsimiles of them as would be a driver’s license photo. Therefore, the photos are not a direct conduit to the people he photographs. Instead, he as the artist mediates what the audience sees and knows. He does this through whom he chooses to photograph and the creative compositional choices he makes. His pictures and writing tell a nuanced story about him as well as his subjects.
Your photographs for this assignment will be a collaboration between you and your diverse subjects. You will be asking them to trust that you will represent who they are in a truthful and respectful manner. Remember that a driver’s license photo says very little about a person beyond what they look like. In this assignment, the value of you as the photographer making photos of people is that you can make visual decisions and can use camera techniques and compositions to symbolically describe to your audience what they need to know to understand the persons you show them from a purely human point of view. When your audience sees your photographs they will not only know something interesting about your subjects, they will also know something about you.
Peer Review Requirement:
After the photographic portion of the assignment is complete you will conduct a Peer Review of the work of ten of your photographer classmates. In this review, you will give your opinion of the work from four perspectives. Peer review is an important way your classmates learn how effective their photos are with their audience. It is also a way you learn to effectively communicate exactly why an image works or doesn’t work.
Please clearly and succinctly address these four areas in each of your ten Peer Reviews:
- What is your “gut” feeling of the photos? You can base this on your knowledge of the assignment problems from watching the tutorials, other images you have seen, and your experience doing this assignment as well.
- How well did your classmate apply the camera or lens skills discussed in the tutorials? Do you see evidence that he or she tried to apply creative techniques like using a long focal length (zoom) lens or using soft natural light from a window? Are the photos in focus? Did the photographer expose the photos properly? What can the photographer improve overall?
- How effectively did your classmate use the compositional techniques described in the tutorials to communicate something about the person photographed from either an aesthetic or an informational perspective? Give examples where this either happened or should have happened. Is there evidence of active composition? Are the backgrounds cluttered or distracting?
- How effectively did the photographer engage their subjects when photographing them? Base this assessment from what you see in the pictures. What is the visual evidence that the photographer sought to communicate something meaningful about the persons he or she photographed?
To ensure thoroughness, each Peer Review must be at least 250 words
Image effectiveness can be paradoxical. Sometimes an image can be very effective even if it has technical “flaws.” Or the image can technically perfect but be quite dull.
That assessment is basically your “gut response” to the image and it makes your criticism more complex than simply saying it is technically good or bad. Artfulness does not always arise from doing everything right. Sometimes an image has a kind of magic that makes it great. Explain clearly how an why it has or lacks that magic is a critical skill you can develop through your peer reviews.