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Final blog post

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I cannot believe that nine weeks has passed. I really enjoy Photography class, and it seems like posting two blog posts every week has become my habit. It is sad to know that this is going to be my last post on this blog. The past nine weeks were really fun! Uploading photos every week made me realize what kind of photography that I am good at (shooting random still objects) and what I am not (mostly everything else haha). I also had a chance to work a lot with awesome tools that I have never utilized before such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom (because I shoot film and usually take photos straight out of my film scanner, unedited). Reading Rexer's The Critical Eye was also a great experience. I really like how the book divides each photography genre into separate corresponding chapter. Moreover, the book does not overwhelm me with hundreds of photos/photographers, but instead, featuring just a few incredible photos/photographers with clear discussion about them. An
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Blog post #6

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Vivian Maier A few years ago, I was in search of a Rolleiflex camera and upon researching about this camera online, I came across an amazing photographer named Vivian Maier. She, with her Rolleiflex, has shot thousands of incredible photographs of the people and city of Chicago, sparking my love for street photography (and the camera also!). Yet, digging deeper into this photographer's background, I realized that, unlike her well-known photographs, her life was, in contrast, very private. In fact, her work almost never got to publicity, not until a realtor named John Maloof stumbled upon a box of Vivian's negatives at an auction house that he paid $400 for. He realized how good they were, and started posting them on Flickr. The pictures quickly got noticed by photographers around the world, but sadly, it was after Vivian's death. Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926. She worked as a nanny in New York, and later moved to Chicago in the 1950s.
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Blog post #8b

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These are some photos I took on my recent trip to Madison. To be honest, it was so difficult to select a good frame for a picture in a vast city where everywhere and everything could fit nicely and beautifully in a frame. And also, I was using a new film camera that I just got a few weeks before the trip, and the slow handling (I hadn't got used to the camera yet) really made me miss a few shots. Nevertheless, here they are...
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Blog post #8a

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In this chapter, Rexer discusses about street photography. He wrote: "Sometimes the photographer's agenda is broadly political, [...] committed to revealing unseen or ignored conditions and the people who experience them. Sometimes it is aesthetic, to capture the changing patterns of light, shadow, color, and form that define the ineffable atmosphere of the moments in the city." However, no matter what the purpose is, I find, for street photography, they all share one thing in common, which is candidness, which is what I find interesting in street photography. In fact, I believe street is probably the most candid kind of photography. It involves no studio lighting, no setup or anything, but instead is just a photographer capturing split moments in everyday life. That is also what makes street photography very free and available, thus to a certain extend, easy. But among the vast availability, only very few pictures (decisive moments capturing beautiful people's intera
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Blog post #7b

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Landscape I am not a landscape kind of guy. I do a lot of travel photography and thus if I do take landscape photos, most of them came from my travel. I like playing with lighting in my photos and I feel like I can only take good photos when the lighting is right (also the reason why I don't do much landscape, I rely too much on sunlight - sadly - and I normally wouldn't waste a frame of film even when the scene is nice but the lighting is wrong). However, there is one relevant (I guess?) type of photography which I do excessively, skyscape! I don't know what is so interesting of the clouds and sky, but if you will definitely see me pointing my camera up during a nice weather day (It got to point where it became my habit to always have my camera in my hands whenever flying, during takeoff)
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Blog post #7a

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In this chapter, Rexer discusses landscape photography and its meaning. He posed questions such as "People still make such pictures by the tens of thousands, but for what purpose, exactly? For memory's sake?" [p.78]. To me, landscape photographs are exactly memories of myself, of places where I visited, so that in the future, I can browse through them with my children, pointed at places telling my stories and experiences regarding to those particular places, and say "that's how they look back then". Nature changes, and now under the influence of human, changes even faster and more drastically. We see how development takes place by looking at historical pictures of New York City, we see how destructive we are by looking at old pictures of the Amazon rainforest. Landscape photograph is the memory of human being. And, now I know where they got the names MacOS Yosemite and MacOS El Capitan from lmao.
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Blog post #5b

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Abstraction "It offers an occasion to see beyond images with  the mind's eye and memory's lens" [p.114] I like to think of abstraction as a means for a photographer to express emotions and feelings without their photographs being representational. In that sense, photography opens a whole world of interpretation, and becomes truly free. While these pictures aren't as "abstract" as some of the examples in Rexer's book, I still feel like they have some mysterious aspects that are somewhat abstract to me... in some sense. To me, they all share a certain mood but also it is hard to explain since they all lack a context that usually helps convey the meaning of a photograph.
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