This was an exciting week for taking photos. I took on an architectural photography project for class and I learned very quickly that there are issues when photographing private spaces; I’ll admit right now I was pretty naive to it all. When I went scouting I got a few looks from security guards without really understanding why and as one guard made her way over I got spooked, gave up and walked away. Totally distraught, (not really) I did a little research and it didn’t take long to find the photographer vs. security guard stories. Thankfully, on shoot day the one security that approached me was a total gem and had no problems if I only took photos of the exterior of the building. I learned a lesson about private property and my rights as photographer though.
In illustration, my teacher brought in a few practicing comic book artists and they had a panel discussion about the process in front of a nice, big and engaged audience. I’m not that interested in comic books but it was exciting to see the curtain pulled back on the industry and hear about all the writers and editors and artists that work together with the goal of telling a story.
Two of my classmates, Laura Sand and Nikki Stephens, and myself are working on a packaging project for a client. We’ve been chopping rough cuts out of cardboard and pasting them back together to make an exciting unboxing experience. In illustration I pulled out the paint brush and acrylics and did a little mark-making for a a pattern project. I repeat it a lot but it’s refreshing to take a break from the mouse and computer and work with real life tools that are not pencils, sharpies and highlighters. I should be doing this more often.
This coming week I’ve got a little personal goal to take my camera around everywhere and get some street photography shots. I’m still uncomfortable taking photos of people but I’m making an attempt at combating it.
Lastly, this very fun service called Vine launched. It’s Instagram for videos (and to be fair some would probably argue against that) but the important part is that it’s all about easily editing together a quick, approximately 6 second video. It’s like a GIF with sound. I really like thinking about how you could tell stories with it that would be more difficult – but not impossible – to tell in a single photograph.