So I'm so lucky to be working at Bellaire High School now. I love it so much that even though (despite my good record with phones) I lost a phone (for the first time ever) while camping only a few months ago, shattered my new phone (for the first time ever) when it fell off of the kitchen counter AND THEN only two days later my phone fell into the toilet when I forgot it was in my back pocket and I'm all down about this bad luck, I'm STILL thinking, well, at least I really enjoy my job! Bellaire is fantastic and will help you get professional development beyond the school to further your own education with the thought that this will make you a better educator. Makes sense, right?
Anyways... So I was fortunate enough to be able to sign up for this interesting looking class at Houston Center for Photography about "Experimenting With Your Camera". Dion McInnis is a thoughtful and passionate educator and I enjoyed watching his style, word choices, and what he chose to emphasize and remind me about photography and why I've loved the medium for so long. He challenged us to use settings on our DSLRs that maybe we overlook and pushed us to use them in the "wrong" way with artistic intent.
A lot of good ideas came to mind during his initial lecture, but I ended up completing a study on my Canon 6D white balance. I've always just used either auto or manual white balance and never thought to let my camera decide what is "correct" white and color in any given situation. I had seen some fake fruit at Hobby Lobby a few days prior and I was drawn to its plasticity and the thought of cliche of fruit bowl oil painting still lives. I spray painted each fruit white (not with much grace or success) and set up a makeshift white box out of pieces of mat board I had lying around on top of my ironing board and lit by two desktop lamps from either side. I took the same image of each fruit with each pre-set color balance choice (ie... tungsten, shade, sunny, fluorescent, etc..). I was really impressed and intrigued by the completely different colors and overall moods each image assumed.
I thought about various means of display to be able to compare the colors side by side. I played around with various layouts in Photoshop. I thought a lot about Andy Warhol and his pop art images. I thought about what a disgrace my terribly painted bell pepper is in the context of art/photo history and Edward Weston's "Pepper #30" - a long time favorite and inspiration of mine. I thought about the unnecessary process of removing color from these images and tediously re-adding color back to the images... Dion had great feedback for everyone in our small class when images were shown from our assignment. He said that he sees this study as a great jumping off point for a larger body of work. I really enjoy the process and hope to continue to grow this into something more....
