Photo Editing Class Fall 2014

I used this photo I took in Sedona, Arizona for this semester's pictorialsm project. The pictorial projects have helped me see how simple landscapes can be used to capture the feel of photographs from the early 20th Century.

I also did this project on surrealism. The instructor kept me busy with making changes.

Photo Editing Class Summer 2014

Another summer and another Photo Editing course with Mike Swoboda. For the first project we had to compare a place or person over a time span. I used two photos of my parents in Berlin in 1955. We lived in Germany that year when my father was in the army. I went to Berlin in 1988 and had some similar photos. They are standing in front of the Brücke der Einheit that connected the American Sector of Berlin with Potsdam in East Germany. The tour I was on didn't go to this crossing but went to the Friedrichstraße crossing better known as Checkpoint Charlie.  On the Brandenburg Gate in the 1955 photo is a Soviet Union flag. In front of the gate when I was in Berlin was the Berlin Wall. The top of the collage   focuses on the 1961 Berlin Crisis and President Kennedy’s trip in 1963. The lower portion focuses on Berlin before and during WWll. The right side is about the 1948 – 1949 Berlin Blockade. The photo over the front page of the newspaper is a Douglas C-54 Skymaster approaching Tempelhof Airport with food, fuel, and supplies to the West Berliners.

More Route 66 Images

Back in March, I uploaded an image of an abandonned motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. I have some more images that I want to post. They tend to be more bleak than nostalgic.

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Food Photo Project

Our last class project was to photograph food for an advertisement, menu or article in a food magazine. The class members printed their versions and they were hanging in the hallway. The instructor took them down and he made 11 large prints. But there are 19 students in the class. My picture was not printed. Another student made several trips to an Italian sandwich shop to photograph a meatball sub. Each week the instructor had various  things he wanted changed. I think he had to eat 4 meatball subs. Bottom line. His meatball sub is no longer on the wall. The wall is for the entire class. It is not a juried competition.

Horizontal Format Posters for TV Monitor Rejected

I made a few minor adjustments before summating the electronic versions I talked about in the previous post. They were rejected.

He wasn't happy about the way I made the posters look like a spread from a textbook outlining the course.

He didn't want the theatrical posters around part of the design.

Here is the layout that  has been accepted.

I was sorry to see the theatrical posers omitted. I thought it was important to demonstrate the large number of classic films in each genre.

Film Class Posters for the Fall Semester

I've designed some posters for Rob Hahn's film studies class on the the 1960's. The original posters were designed in portrait format and are in several places on campus. 

The library wants to put a digital version of the posters on the monitor screen  by the main desk. The posters were reconfigured for a 16:9 format. Since each image will only be on the monitor 25 seconds, the descriptive paragraph was removed. The theme was chapters of a textbook. The brief description of the chapter helps get out the message that there is more to film studies than watching movies. 

There is no prerequisite for the film study classes at Saint Louis Community College and they are taken as GenEd classes by most of those enrolled in the class. Only a few are in film production, script writing, or have taken the basic film appreciation class and know about formal analysis. Some students, especially the older non traditional students think the instructor is going to be like Robert Osborne and give an introduction, and then after the movie all they have to say is how they liked the film and the acting performance and he will give them an A. 

To see the entire series of posters and digital images in a larger format click here to scroll through the Design set on my Flickr site.

Route 66 Revisited

I have taken so many photos of the tourist attractions on Route 66. They tend to have a similarity of the past being glorified and trying to be revived, while a few miles away on the Interstate is the modern America. I took this photo in Tucamcari, New Mexico, that shows what has happened to a significant part of 66.

Pictorialism Project 2014

This year in photo editing class the pictorialism project is the first assignment. I am working on a Photo I took in the Bradbury building. A lot of movies have been filmed there and some people call  it the Blade Runner Building. The instructor looked at ou preliminary results and thinks I should add more gold color to the gradient mapping step so the image will look like an orotone print.
































Here is the original image.

I used this image to copy what was behind the person.

 

Here is the orotone version of the project.

Yesterday I watched Scorcese's film The Age of Innocence (1993). I was impressed by his use of color in the interior scenes in the mansions of New York during the Gilded Age and early twentieth century. I wanted to see if I could create something similar. I turned off the gradient mapping layer and this is what I got.

This morning I was watching parts of the film noir D.O.A and the television episode of the Outer Limits episode Demon with a Glass Hand (1964), which were shot in the Bradbury Building. I wanted to see if I could create the low key lighting style. Here is what I did later this morning.

New Design Project

I am currently working on a calender called The Pueblos of New Mexico. There are 19 Pueblos in New Mexico. Over half of them are less than an hours drive from Albuquerque. The others are between Santa Fe and Taos. Getting the permits to photograph won't be that difficult since it will be a non profit venture and no tribal members will be photographed. Here is the first photo I will use. It was taken at the Isleta Pueblo.