First Emulation

Eadweard Muybridge is best known for answering the galloping horse question and creating the earliest form of videography. Muybridge cotinued his motion studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He published Animal Locomotion, a book of over 20,000 images created from 1883 to 1886, studying the movement of people and animals.

I decided to emulate some of his motion studies for my project. I thought this would be relatively easy and believed I could just set my digital SLR to continuous shooting. I did however run into some challenges with this approach. 

I started with this picture of the hand drawing in a circular motion. I liked that he documented the hand from the side and front views. It looked like Muybridge used an overhead light, leaving a shadow underneath the hand. In the studio, I used the boom to set the flash over Melissa Webb, my model's hand. The problem was the flash cannot continuously fire like the camera on the continuous shooting setting. I ended up just shooting as fast as I could and made about three black photos to every one good shot. 

I like how the side view shots turned out, but if I would redo this shoot, I would definitely put Melissa in a black sweatshirt. You lose her hand in the white and it's really distracting. 

A Midnight Carnival by Chris Raecker

http://www.chrisraecker.com/MC.html


If you follow the above link, you can view the gallery of A Midnight Carnival, a series of photographs by Chris Raecker. This series inspired one of my recent shoots. Chris Raecker uses photoshop on his images to create the soft silhouette on the subject. I also really like the extreme angle that most of his shots are taken. The third thing that his photographs needs to have is something going on in the sky. He never photographs on a clear day. 

My idea to emulate this style of images was to photograph at a park playground. I thought this was an interesting comparison  because for a little kid, a playground is kind of an amusement park. I created my silhouette by duplicating the image then applying a Gaussian blur and then using the multiply blend mode to blend it back in. I like how this looks a little fantasy like because the people in my photos are not children. The shadows almost makes it look like a dream like return to childhood on the playground. One thing I would do differently would be to shoot on a better day for the clouds. I feel like my photos lack some of the drama that is so interesting in "A Midnight Carnival" because I do not have as strong imagery in the sky. 

Latest Open Bar Night Poster

This is my most recent poster in the Open Bar Night Series. It is my favorite so far. I feel like the design has developed a lot with the assembly line of bottles replacing the usual black bar. I also like the font for Brewery Tour. I think it has the same qualities as the other fonts I have used but is easier to read. I created the capital B and T. This poster also has some texture in the background, which I kind of did in the ladies night poster but I feel it is more successful here.

 I showed this poster at the AIGA student folio review and got some really good feedback. One of the suggestions was based off the 25 - 15 - 5 rule. From 25 feet away people could read the brewery tour, and from 15 they could read most of the other text. I feel like for the next poster I will try to add in that 5 foot level of information. I could use an interesting statistic to really draw people in and make them want to learn more.