Ames' syllabi

For my study, I decided to experiment with the back podcast room in the TV Control Room in the AMC. I wanted to explore the psychological aspect of being in a space like that, and what I could do to create an illusion and different perspectives. I created a video for this after some sketches in my sketchbook. The video is an overview of that room that’s completely dark except for blue LED Strip lights and then different angles of that. Then, we zoom into the light a little bit and I put my hand in front of the strips up and down to create movement which then creates subtle illusions. This demonstrates how light can be shifted through attention, depth, and atmosphere without changing the physical environment. With more of a close up, the led creates flickering with filming it, w7hich can distort the viewers feeling and overall perception. With this showing and study, I specifically explored how the light can feel unstable or calming depending on how we interact with it. I chose to do video as my medium because I wanted to capture the changes over time and to truly immerse the viewer in shifting the psychological effects of light from calm to intense.

Here are my sketches/storyboard with notes.

Here’s my video:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13aUxQS_oC–htcGZbPUWkge40PEVa2sD2kvxWMcVGI0/edit?usp=sharing

This week on Dragon Ball Z a tired college student recreates goku’s signature attack The kamehameha wave. I used a projector hooked up to my laptop to project the image. I then tapped my phone to a stool and set a timer on my camera. I tried it with different lighting, darker and lighter. I also used photoshop to remove the background of the effect.

For my project, I decided to focus on shadows. Shadows are often overlooked in lighting despite the important role they play in color, contrast, etc. Therefore, I wanted to highlight how they can be used in one of the most simple, well-known ways, which was shadow puppets. I chose to do a crab, dog, and snail. It was challenging to figure out how to capture the shadows properly without accidentally photographing the hands creating the animal shapes, but overall it was an easy process that was effective in using lighting creatively.

During the 4th of July this past summer I went to Pymatuning with my best friends. We set off fireworks, swam, and had so much fun. I thought back to that weekend and about the fireworks and how much fun it was to see the light off of them. I know I couldn’t set off fireworks on campus so the next best options… Sparklers. I ended up photographing my friend in her letters for Greek Week. I came up with these cute photographs that use the sparkler as the only source of light. 

I took images during Winter break and messed with a lot of light filters, such as saturation, which led to a lot of alterations and an overall change in the image’s mood. These were all taken in Florida, and I really wanted to see how much information an image can actually retain when putting filters on these images.

For my light project, I decided to do a silhouette. When I first read the project description, I immediately thought about doing photography. Through the idea of a silhouette, I wanted to express a darker, lonely emotion through the photos. I took pictures of my friends with their shadows on the wall. Through these shadows I wanted them to represent what it can be like sometimes being in college. Sometimes, especially in the beginning of the school year, I felt trapped in my dorm alone without my family and felt homesick. I wanted to portray this feeling through my project. I used the dorm walls and a dark shadow of my friends to show a feeling of loneliness within a dorm. For the experimentation part of the project, I utilized different light sources to see which one best reflected the shadow on the wall. The first two photos use a regular phone flashlight, while the last photo uses a desk light. The desk light best showed the shadow on the wall, and having the camera be portrait rather than landscape best fit the shadow in the photo.

For this project, after thinking about light, I realized I have a plant that is the perfect subject for this. My leafy plant, the third plant from the left, he’s a prayer plant. His leaves fold upward when it gets dark. So, I chose to do a timelapse that examines the way the prayer plant moves based on the light. When it got dark, it was tough to keep it dark enough so that the plant reacts but not too dark that the camera cannot pick up the image. I noticed if I have too many lights on inside, the plant will not fold. Although hard to see, the leaves on the prayer plant fold upward when it gets dark and back down as the morning sun comes in.

For this assignment it was a bit hard deciding on what i should do specifically. However, going off of the videos we watched in class last Wednesday i decided to showcase how light reflects off of a dark glass surface. Dark surfaces change how light is both absorbed and scattered. As I’d recently had my cars windows tinted I chose my windshield—as it is was the ideal glass surface. From the overhead view the light is seen only partially reflecting, making the inside somewhat visible but as the light scatters the glass acts almost like a mirror.