Music: Sleepy He@d - Done with the Stuck (Beat
Handbook 2012)
CC
Licensed: Attribution
In
the video are still photos along the theme "Stuck" with the sub-theme
of "Dull vs. Bright". The photos reflect the everyday aesthetics within the theme and
sub-theme. No photos were edited (except cropped to 16x9 HD in Iphoto) as to
keep the raw, urban, ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ photography (Murray
2008,161) feel to it. Although not chronologically
ordered, the photos were arranged to give a sense of story with the music,
lyrics and beats. The effects of fades were incorporated to give a sense of
"you're" the person walking around looking at all these images, along
with the music convey what the viewer and the subjects together were
feeling.
The
pictures were captured with an Iphone 4, cropped with Iphoto, compiled and
produced in Imovie with music provided through Soundcloud.com under the
Creative Commons: Attributions License.
The theme of our Photo Essay is Carpets which is a perfect example that demonstrates the concept of everyday aesthetics described in the Susan Murray reading. Carpets are the base of our every steps in everyday living and common lifestyle that is an unnoticed part of our routine.
Murray describes photography as a phenomenon that “has become less about
the special or rarefied moments of domestic living and more about an immediate,
rather fleeting display and collection of one’s discovery and framing of all
the small and mundane" (Susan Murray)
Carpets are the nucleons of the small and mundane everyday ignorance. All the pictures in the slides are clicked on the iPhone 4s and therefore some grainy textures. This Grainy quality of few pictures reflects Murray's discovery that there is a place for both perfect and imperfect photography. Essentially through our photography and editing we wanted to illustrate the Commonness and mundane attributes of the everyday walked all over carpet.
CC Licensed: Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike
The theme for our photo essay is ‘everyday public transport’
with a sub-theme of ‘damage’.We chose
this theme as we believe it directly encapsulates the concept of an ‘everyday
aesthetic’ as referred to in the Susan Murray reading, ‘Digital Images, Photo
Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.” Public transport,
such as trains, buses, the monorail and the ferry captured in our photographs,
are part of on an everyday process of instances, events and objects that are
overlooked and become part of a routine. Our aim as amateur photographers was
to capture a collection of photographs of things that in an everyday
environment are unnoticed, and apply various different frames, angles, and
effects, through iPhoto to create something aesthetically pleasing and
appealing. We selected the song ‘Ghost Key’ by Dust ft Bijou to accommodate the
deteriorated and damaged sub-theme of our photo essay, and to add to the
character of the photos. Essentially, we tried to make the ‘mundane’ aspects of
public transport become noticed and photographically appealing through capturing
a different perspective through our photographs and editing.
Chris Heaslip and Vicki Nessis - Drains and Waste
Music by imaginaryband - GREEN&ORANGEnowater CC Attribution
Rationale In an environment where we have relatively unlimited access to water it is easy for us to disregard and forget that H2O is a precious resource which isn’t so readily available in other countries around the world. We can mindlessly watch this invaluable commodity be flushed down the drain without a second thought of the millions of people who are struggling without it everyday. It is with this thought we decided to closely observe and analyse urban drains, which otherwise would be forgotten and overlooked. By putting the spotlight on drains the consumer considers our societies water treatment and if it is the best course of action for us, and if it is making the most of our bountiful supply of water. We aimed to capture contrasting types of drains to portray the variety of issues within this world wide problem, including neglected, overused, large and small. The inclusion of photos depicting rubbish built up in some of the drains highlights our passive and careless nature to our water treatment. Though hopefully our photo essay will greater awaken us to the role of drains in our urban society.
In Murray’s reading, she discusses in depth
the decentralization of photography and identifies the “shift in the engagement
with the everyday image”. Murray states that photography “has become less about
the special or rarified moments of domestic living and more about an immediate,
rather fleeting display and collection of one’s discovery and framing of all
the small and mundane.” This idea is one we wanted to explore further in our
photo essay. As our stimulus for our project, we used Murray’s ideas of the
everyday aesthetic and amateur photography. The theme for our project was ‘Windows’
and our supporting sub theme was ‘The Home’. The intention of our project was
to create a collaboration of images which personified the traditionally mundane
object. Through effective use of editing, angles, colour, lighting and sound,
we were able to manipulate the images into becoming more then just the everyday
aesthetic, rather as fleeting, malleable and lively (Murray 2008). In order to create an effective and engaging
project we set the following guidelines:
- - The windows of choice must be
taken from the outside of homes (our subtheme).
- - The windows must reflect a sort
of personality, eg natural decay, style etc.
- - When editing, we decided that
we would accentuate this idea of personality within the windows through
cropping, zooming and contrast in order to highlight the reflection of the
window.
We named our project‘Hidden World’ to enhance and support the
story our images tell. In order to create a sense of cohesiveness within our
project, our initial and ending slides are images of windows on the front door
of a home. The music incorporated in our photo essay is ‘We felt the fall –
Lemolo’ (a cover by coMa and Sorrow). In iMovie, we edited our sound to have a
cathedral effect in order to support our eerie and ghostly style. The process
of our photo essay closely reflects Murray’s key arguments, in particular her
idea of the progressive relationship with the everyday image in helping alter
the way we “construct narratives ourselves and the world around us.”
The Follow Signs photo essay is themed signage with the sub- theme of weathering and rust. These themes reflect Murray’s notion of the “ temporal relationship with the everyday image” (Murray 2008, 151). This essay narrates chronologically a ‘road trip’ from the urban city landscape to the coastal suburban landscape. The locations chosen have autobiographical connections to both creators of the essay, reflecting a characteristic noted in Murray’s study of successful Flickr pages.
To capture the images both photographers used iPhone 3G’s. This convergent technology, accentuated the amateur practice of capturing ‘snap shots’ spontaneously. At times the qualities of images are poor however this emphasises the sub-theme of ‘weatheredness’ and the rustic character of signs. The grainy quality of some photos also reflects Murray’s discovery that there is a place for both ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ photography (Murray 2008,161).
Photos were edited in iPhoto; lighting and warm colour tones were adjusted to highlight the signs features. iMovie was then used to compose the photos in a narrative; dissolve transitions most successfully expressed the sub-theme’s character, black outs and white outs were also useful in connecting the photos fluidly. The music was selected from SoundCloud under the Creative Commons Attributions and Share Alike License. "Summer Jones" by KuyaGood (2012). The track was also slightly edited in GarageBand in order to compliment the video it was placed alongside.
Hannah Farrell 42467187 Joshua Rust
BibliographyMURRAY, S. 2008. Digital Images, Photo Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture, 7.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Trash and Treasure.
By Patrick Eid and Matthew McAnally.
Theme: Trash Sub-theme: Texture Produced by Patrick Eid and Matthew McAnally Music: Well, funk's for nothing- By choir shark "Well, funk's for nothing" by choirshark is licensed under a Creative Commons License
The photo essay, entitled ‘Trash and Texture,’ is in direct response to the understanding of ‘Everyday Aesthetics’ reflected in the Susan Murray reading, ‘Digital Images, Photo Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.’ The theme, trash, was selected because it not only reflects a “rather fleeting display of one’s discovery of the small and mundane” (p. 151) but also challenges the assumed principles in everyday living. Hence, the nature of the title concurrently emphasises the timeless concept of trash and treasure together with the ironic contrast of the assumed, cliché metaphor by replacing the word ‘treasure’ with ‘texture.’ Together, the subversion draws a parallel with our subtheme, texture, which highlights “fascination (of the subjectivity of treasure) with the process of compilation and comparison” (p. 155). On this note, the choice of exploring texture by progressively coloring sepia photos through blurred transition symbolises how “Subjectivity shifts and (how) our relationship to the temporal can never be fixed” (p. 156) once we adopt another view in life. Lastly, Choirshark’s funk and jazz fusion track, ‘Well, Funk’s for Nothing,’ compliments the alternative view of trash being interesting by the use of increasingly upbeat tones to describe it as nothing short of spectacular.
The central theme that inspired
our photo essay was to explore the versatility of representations of food in
urban spaces. Significantly, we strived to capture the vital essence of food in
everyday life, centring particularly upon as Murray (2008: 155) refers to as
the “ability to locate the beauty in the mundane”. Additionally, in order to
emphasise the beauty of food, opposed to the mundane and practical uses of food
in everyday life, we chose the sub-theme of vibrancy. Hence, by juxtaposing the
varying colours and tones of food, places where food are served and consumed allowed
for a broader range of images to be produced. Food, being an essential aspect of life ‘often goes unnoticed’due to its disposable nature and thus, transcends
upon Murray’s category of ‘ephemera’. This closely interrelates with ‘everyday
aesthetics’ as it significantly demonstrates something such as food that is very
much regarded as an integral, immediate function and necessity of a human
being's everyday life.The photos used were all taken in the CBD as we
felt this distinctly accentuated upon the concept of the ‘everyday aesthetic’
quality as it fundamentally encapsulates not only urbanized shots of the way food is
presented but also analyses and captures the ways and places people serve, buy
and consume food.
References
Murray, S (2008) 'Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of
Everyday Aesthetics', Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 7(2), pp. 147-163.
In this assignment I focused on the theme ‘Stuck’ and the
sub-theme, ‘Colour’. The concept behind this theme is the idea of finding mundane
items that are stuck, whether they are glued, taped, or naturally formed, on
every day areas i.e. walls, floors, ceilings and other objects. By visiting
urbanised areas i.e. the city and Balmain, I found a variety of different items
i.e. posters, nails, stickers, tape, hair, fluff and gum. As I focused on the
‘colour’ sub-theme, I was able to capture interesting aspects of these items by
emphasizing their vibrant colours in my photographs via natural lighting and in
the editing process. I could also determine how long that item has been stuck
for by looking at the richness in colour of the objects, and I also could judge
whether that object was stuck intentionally or just a natural occurrence.
Through this assignment I was able to alter my interaction
with image and the everyday aesthetic. By focusing on the small items of life that
go unnoticed, I highlighted the main concepts of Week 5’s reading, ‘Digital
Images, Photo-Sharing and Everyday Aesthetics’. This article centred on the
case study Flickr.com and was based on the social use in digital
photography.Murray argues that there
has been a significant shift in the way we interact with the everyday image as,
digital photography has ‘become less about the special or rarefied moments of
domestic living and more about an immediate, rather fleeting, display and
collection of one’s discovery and framing of the small and mundane’ (Murray
2008: 147). Murray also commented on the role of the amateur photographer that
‘can create and comment on with relative authority and ease’ (Murray 2008: 151)
and the idea that their photographs have ‘some sort of artistic aspirations or
pretensions in their composition, use of lighting or framing’ (Murray 2008:
155). In my collection of photographs, I discovered objects that are in fact, ‘small
and mundane’, and took on the role as the amateur photographer by focusing on an
artistic aspect of taking a photo i.e. colour. In my findings, I discovered a
range objects that were full in fantastic rich colours, whether they were on
posters, gum and signs and some that were rather dull in colour i.e. nails and webs,
which I could make interesting comparisons in vibrant colour vs. dull colour.
In the editing process I used tools that brought out these vibrant colours even
more. My choice in mundane photographs, sharp editing transitions, fast paced editing,
and choice in music with a bouncy adventure feel, created a realistic urbanised
environment. I feel that with these photographs and the way they were
transformed into a short video, I captured the concepts that were discussed in
the Murray reading and the theme ‘Stuck’ and sub-theme ‘Colour’.
Murray, S (2008) Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our
Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics. Journal of Visual Culture August 2008
vol. 7(2). 147-163.
Bumps and Bitchumen explores the theme of roads and pavements with a sub-theme of texture. We took a creative approach to the sub-theme of texture, incorporating cracks, paint, litter, shadows, flora and fauna and other environmental features which reflects the 'everyday aesthetic'. The images were shot in both city and suburban settings in order to show a contrast in the subject matter of the overall theme. In iPhoto we used various techniques, including contrast and exposure, to enhance the visible textures in the photos. In iMovie we used the Ken Burns effect to draw the viewer's attention to certain details and in some photos the effect was used to simulate driving down a road. We chose a track in the 'lounge' genre to accentuate the atmosphere of both settings. In order to synchronise our project with our chosen soundtrack we used the flashy 'Fade to White' transition to match the driving rhythm at the beginning of the song and then the smoother 'Cross Dissolve' transition was used, as well as longer timings on the photos, towards the end where the music slows down.
'Splish Splash'
By Ashliegh Wilson and Yan Yang Li
Rationale:
Water is a vital material for all human
beings as all our intercellular processes take place within water. This is why
we chose water as our theme as it appeals to the everyday aesthetic. Everyday you will see water whether it be due to rain, or a drink. However the movements and pattern water creates instantaneously can considerably be overlooked. By using a
Single Lens Reflex Camera and iMovie program, the production of ‘Splish Splash’
was created. This production attempts to emphasise the multiple patterns water
can make through its movement hence our sub-theme of patterns/movement. In order
to evoke a sense of modern relaxation, an upbeat yet tranquil soundtrack was
created using Garageband. This appeals to Murray's 'everyday aesthetic' as the photos capture different patterns in which water has automatically created due to a disturbance, which isn't always admired in ones everyday life.
