It Was Raining Last Weekend

It was raining and I got some cool pictures. I like the rain and I wish I had a waterproof camera or a better way to protect it in the rain because I really like taking pictures in the rain, I'm just always scared I'm going to do something to my camera and I don't really fancy breaking it. Anymore than it already is anyway.

Also, my mom and I got kinda lost and found this back road that was really creepy in the rain with the grey clouds and everything. I had her stop the car so I could take pictures. 

Alaska

When I was in high school I photographed the shows that the theatre department did. Just about all of my friends and my younger sister were involved with the theatre and I couldn't act or sing and I didn't know how to do sets so one day I started taking pictures and it just kinda...snowballed from there. It's actually probably the reason that I decided I wanted to do photography as a job. I spent a lot of time taking photographs my junior and senior years and have thousands of photos of rehearsals and actual performances.

Well, even though I've graduated I have still managed to get roped in to taking photographs of their performances. Since KU isn't that far from where I am from it isn't difficult for me to do so and I do enjoy it, so these are a handful of photographs from the most recent show that they did called Alaska. It was a very interesting show to say the least. Not really what I was expecting, though I don't know what I was expecting since no one had really been able to tell us what it was about.

Dr. Strangelove

So Project 5 for vis comm was to design a DVD cover and back for the movie Dr. Strangelove. It was a very...strange movie. I don't really know how to verbalize it more than that. When I was little my mom would have me watch older movies like The Court Jester and Inspector General and even though Dr. Strangelove wasn't funny in the way that those movies are, it reminded me of them anyway.

When I was thinking about what to do for the cover and such I kept getting stuck on the fancy, wallpaper print sort of covers for books. Even though it has nothing to do with it, I think it's because we were supposed to design a "Criterion Collection" cover and for some reason that reminded me of simple wallpaper covers.

So that's why the covers are pretty simple with only black, white, red and grey as the colors. I kept going back to that plain cover those books had so that is what this DVD wound up with. 

I Don't Know What's Going On...

So I found a bunch of posts sitting as drafts? Apparently they hadn't been posted in the last however many weeks so...that's fun. Um, I'll post them like once a day I guess? I don't know if that's better than just a mass of posts at once.

Book Designs

For this project we are doing some page layouts for a book on a specific artist (graphic designer, illustrator, animator, photographer, etc.) I think that this is a really cool project and a neat way for us to learn about successful people in the fields that we want to go into. 

The person that I chose to do my little part of the book over is Annie Leibovitz. I had heard about her beforehand and then I also heard a lot about her from my vis comm teacher who worked for her while he was living in New York. I thought she sounded like an interesting person and I am really fond of her photographs and wanted to do my part of the book on her.

This is the information that I have written on her and will go (most of it anyway) into the book. 

"Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949 in Waterbury Connecticut. She is Jewish, but nonobservant, saying “I’m not a practicing Jew, but I feel very Jewish” .She originally attended the San Francisco Art Institute to study painting, but then found photography. She lived for a short time on a kibbutz where she explored her photographic skills.

In 1970 she started working for the Rolling Stones. Leibovitz approached the founding editor, Jann Wenner who gave Leibovitz her first assignment to photograph John Lennon. Within a short time she was the chief photographer.  

During the Rolling Stones’ 1975 international tour she accompanied the band. Her favourite photograph being one that she took of Mick Jagger in an elevator.

On December 8, 1980 Leibovitz photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The photograph was of Ono completely clothed and Lennon wrapped around her disrobed. Leibovtiz promised that the photograph would be on the cover and it was. She was the last person to professionally photograph Lennon before he was killed.

After working for Rolling Stones Leibovitz began working for the magazine, Vanity Fair. The same year that she began working for the magazine her first book was published. Leibovitz became known for her “wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities”. Some of her most famous are of Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore. She has also photographed celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Ellen DeGeneres, Scarlett Johannson and Kiera Knightly. Her photographs have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker as well as other ad campaigns.

In 1991 she had an exhibit at the National Portrait gallery and was the second living portraitist and the first woman to be there. In 1999 she published a book entitled Women that was accompanied by Susan Sontag. In the book Leibovitz showed females in images from the Supreme Court to coal miners. Her most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, shows her celebrity portraits as well as personal photographs from her life. These photographs are of her parents and children and Susan Sontag. She calls them “a memoir in photographs”. The idea was brought about by the deaths of Sontag and her father, which happened close together.

Recently she was hired by Disney to do a series for the “Year of a Million Dreams” and photograph celebrities in different scenes. She also took the photograph of Miley Cyrus that caused a commotion from parents due to the fact that the photograph suggested that she was naked and Cyrus was still involved with Disney.

Leibovitz is the mother of three children, Sarah, and twins Susan, and Samuelle named after Susan Sontag and Leibovitz’s father."

I think that she is a very interesting person and personally I like what she says about being Jewish because I identify with that a lot. 

Project Between 5 & 6

For this project in vis comm we were supposed to recreate a snapshot that was on the page, take a picture of the sun, strangers holding hands, the view once you've climbed a tree, and a video of someone dancing. These were mine.

My take on the sun. It's from behind the clouds. You can still technically see the sun. It was cloudy and rainy that day so it was the best shot that I could get. 

Two very nice ladies from the Tollhouse Cookie place in the mall let me take their picture. I thought they'd say no because they were in their uniform. I won't post the picture because I told them that it wouldn't go on the internet. 

I'm afraid of heights so I took a different meaning to the tree photo. I got on my stomach and took one from the lowest angle instead of the highest.

We went to Crown Center for my friend's birthday and they started doing this. I needed a video and it was entertaining so I took it.