an open space

my dear friend Casey and I decided to get back on the tracks and start moving forward. We started by rigging up our own small, personal photo-shoot in his garage. A few old sheets and a couple lamps, that’s all we had, so that’s all we used. so, me, the photographer, and he, my model, shot some photos, using what we had to work with. here are some of the photos…

photography at it’s finest. i came across this site while looking through some friends websites and blogs. some of the landscape photos really caught my eye. something about the way they make everyday locations, or places that seem so familiar seem so beautiful. a picture of dead re-growing trees or a puddle at the end of a blocked off road. the intense close up of the dragonfly was one that i also liked, i enjoy looking at things from a different perspective, or point of view and this artist chris racan did that for me.

http://chrisracan.com/

acqua is this wedding photography website. this site is the portfolio for the company. i have photographed a few weddings, mostly for friends or family of friends or friends of friends, anyhow i am also photogrpahing a wedding in a couple weeks, so i like looking through sites for inspiration, or even just to get ideas about how i want pictures i take to look. mostly i enjoy wedding in general, and it’s fun to look at the photos.

http://www.acquaphoto.com/

on my fourth trip to the wild animal park, the butterfly exhibit was open. this exhibit was open from April 4-April 26th. I went inside this humid sort of tropical feeling cage, where there were plants everywhere, a little stream, and tons of butterflies. When I first walked in I didn’t even realize how many there were. You see some flying around, but then you look at the tons that are just hanging out in the plants. It was crazy! because most of the butterflies were so still, it was easy for me to get quite close and take really close pictures of them. In most everyday time you see a butterfly pass you, and you notice it’s colors and how pretty it is, but you don’t get to see the detailedness of thier bodies. Butterflies are an intereseting contributor to our world. They don’t live very long, but they are great pollinators. So I took a bunch of pictures of butterflies and decided that was what my book was going to be on. I am truelly pleased with my book. I would have loved to do a children’s book on animals, but I didn’t really have a solid story. I’m sure I will make a kids book in the near future.

Big Love, Big Laughter, Big Show. It was great to see my fellow collegues perform an interesting, but funny play. I could sense there was a bit of distraction from the actors, my belief is due to the audience. There were some people who were talking quit loudly throughout the play, which was not only distracting to me, as another audience member, but I could tell it threw some of the actors off. I was in the class that helped build the props and set for the play, It was great to be able to see each prop/thing I helped build for the set, in total action. Especially after working hours upon end trying to make a gigantic cake, when it sat on stage and looked pretty throughout most of the show.

I went to a play reading, an in-progress work. Never being able to be a part of in-progress works, this was my second this semester. It was great to see the play, there were a few spots that didn’t really seem to “work” with the rest of the play, but I really enjoyed the reading, and the actual play itself. It is so much different, watching a work-in-progress reading then it is watching the actual finished works. I really enjoyed that behind the scenes kinda feeling you get as you are watchin it. It was also amazing to be able to talk with the artist/writer and talk about what worked, as seeing it from an audience’s point of view. This also gave me a chance to witness the process behind the artists works

here are some ideas I have for me book. I was thinking about making a childrens book based on these pictures I took of animals at the wild animal park. As I spent hours walking around and looking at all of the different animals, it saddened me that these animals were known as wild, yet the space they were given was in between these bars. Most of the animals are endangered and it is probably great that they are here at the park, being taken care of, and used for scientific study, but I couldn’t get over this empty feeling I had inside my heart for them. They are wild, let them be wild. As a child I remember loving to go to the animal park, or the zoo, but as an adult the feeling isn’t the same.  so i transformed the pictures a bit using photoshop to give them the

tonight I witnessed a dance work-in-progess. Sarah Shelton Mann in collaboration with local artists, two of which are professors at this school. The majority of the dance was improvisational as well as the sound and the lighting. it was like watching something being created right before my eyes. as the music changed, some of the dancers’ movements adapted to the tone of the room, the lighting and the sound combined, as well as being influenced by all the other dancers moving. Each dancer/person/being all brought something different to the stage, each person had their own piece that exemplified maybe something that had happened in a period of their life, or maybe a feeling they were trying to portray/express. After the performance we stayed and talked with Sarah Mann and her fellow collaborators. They spoke about their process and were really interested to see what our opinion(the audience) was.

thinking outside of the norm. looking for ways to spice things up. taking risks. don’t be afraid of negative space. playing with words, visually showing what the words mean. altitude.