Before my final project goes to "print"...

aka is burnt onto a CD, here are a few things that have inspired my work and some final words about photography/this class/anything else as I finish this blog.

- I find Lee Friedlander's work exceptional and very inspirational. I like the concept of taking pictures of the every day and documentary style shots. I also find the fact that he added himself into his pictures in some way very daring and it's something I really like. I love his music portraits as well.
-There's a photo essay that appeared in Rolling Stone in 2008 that I've since remembered and found very inspirational. It has stuck in my mind since as something I'd like to incorporate into my career goals: working for Rolling Stone and doing crazy projects like this. It's called "Welcome to Skatopia: Eighty-Eight Acres of Anarchy in the USA" and I love everything about it. The location, the gritty documentary style (with subtitles), the subject matter. I find it inspirational in my work and in my ideas for my future.
-Rolling Stone is a general thing that inspires me - I love music and alternative cultures (extreme sports included in that) and the types of photos the magazine features are really that documentary style that feature these things. Vibrant, saturated colors are really prominent in the magazine, too, and I think I really incorporated that in my project.

I found this class very rewarding and it gave me a lot of good, new ideas about what I'd like to do with my future. I'd like to continue taking photography classes when I go back to university in the States and see if I can continue to take documentary-style (but still artistically engaging) photos.

Final Project & video version

I made a video version of my final project in order to share it with my friends and family back home. Thought it turned out pretty well. The above are the final photos on their own as well.

Final Project Editing in Photoshop

Got into the lab yesterday and spent a while sorting through my photos and narrowing them down to 19 out of the original 170-ish and then editing them in Photoshop. Here are the results of yesterday's work. Now just to pick the final 8!

Angelic Hell: Day 3

... and my final day of shooting! It wasn't as busy as the week before and I didn't have to spend much time there, but I think I got some good shots to use for the final project (which, by the way, I went to work on in Silverstone today at about 6pm and the media labs wing was locked - I'm used to being able to edit media projects 24/7 at CU Boulder, so this was quite frustrating). I can really tell an improvement in my photographs between my first day of shooting at Angelic Hell and my last (and even my second day). There was one shot I got of a guy getting tattooed that I looked at on my computer when I got home that would've been perfect for the project, though, but his face was not in focus, which was disappointing. Oh well - it's a documentary project, so there are still some good shots that fit well with the project in there. I also finished editing my audio yesterday and am very happy with how it turned out. I spent all of last year editing audio and video for my major, so I feel very confident in it and enjoy it very much. Anyway, here are some of the shots from Friday March 5:

Angelic Hell: Day 2

These are only some pictures from last Friday, on my second day shooting at Angelic Hell. I spent about almost an hour there taking pictures and recording audio/interviewing one of the artists for my soundtrack. There were a lot more people there this time, both working and waiting to be worked on. I'm hoping for the same busy atmosphere when I go in today for my third and final shoot.

Lee Friedlander

Interesting character. I'm really intrigued by him because of his career in photographing musicians and his documentary style - two areas I'm really interested in career-wise myself. Anyway, here is what I have learned:

Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington. He studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and then moved to New York in 1956 to work for Atlantic Records photographing jazz musicians for album covers. He's photographed the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and later Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and most infamously Madonna (which recently fetched $37,500 at auction). Friedlander was often known as a "street photographer." He had a documentary-style approach to taking photos and was greatly influenced by Robert Frank and his book "The Americans." Friedlander's first solo exhibition was at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York in 1963, after which he produced photo essays for Harper's Bazaar. Friedlander also incorporated himself into many of his photographs - whether these were straight-on self portraits, his shadow, his reflection, or his hands or feet. He became housebound because of health problems and had to take a break from 50 years of working in 1994, after which he produced the book "Stems," the inspiration of which came from flowers his wife placed around their home and he said reminded him of limbs. A good resource for viewing all of Friedlander's gallery exhibits (and there are a lot) is Artcyclopedia. And I'm absolutely loving his stuff that I'm finding at the MoMA, by the way.

(Self-Portrait, Haverstraw, New York, 1966)
(Count Basie Band, MoMA, 1956)
(Lake Louise, Canada, 2000)