Photo-ops readingI enjoyed this reading. I've never been a big photography person, and this helped me to see what photographers look for when they are taking pictures and how to make sure it will be a successful photo. For example, the author talks in one section about "framing" the picture using the environment to focus the eye to the subject. I had never thought of doing that when I'm taking a picture before...and I'm sure it's a very effective way of creating a successful picture. After reading this, I feel like I could even be a good photographer in my free time if I wanted to. For this specific project, I think that using any of these components would be helpful in communicating the meaning of the word. One of the concepts that the author talks about is "exploration." I think that using exploration in this project is very important, for when you explore multiple ways of setting up your letters, you get many different ways of looking at your word and you are able to choose the ones that are the most effective in depicting the definition.
Steve Edwards Photography
This reading was very educational. The history of photography was based a lot on the social movements during the past century or so. I thought it was really interesting that photography was not considered an art form until pretty recently and that it was really only thought to be used for documentation. They related this back to the time of the Renaissance and how artists were considered to be lower class and only painting only for documentation purposes, which the artists argued against; they believed that they were doing it as a much higher art form with important subject matter and that a high level of intellectual thinking was needed to do the work that they were doing. The same thing happened with the invention of the camera: it was originally created to allow easier documentation, but artists found a way to make it into one of the most popular art forms of today. I never would have thought that photography could be something to argue over. I guess once again it represents the clash between the more liberal thinkers and the artists. I think that photography is just a more modern way of painting...we can use the same concepts and themes that artists use in painting, we just have a different tool to do it. Like the last reading talked about, photography uses symmetry, grouping, framing, trial and error, etc. These same themes are used in all art forms.
I would say that the photos we are taking for our project are very much from an artistic standpoint. We are not using them to document the fact that our letters were there; we are taking pictures to show others how we are communicating our word in the most effective way possible. Looking at them, we can see how the word is being depicted and how it helps to define the meaning.
Parts of the Letter
This reading on the parts of the letter pertained a lot to this project. The serifs and other parts of the letter help communicate different meanings (it can make it more simple, more complicated, more squished (confined), more expanded, taller, fatter). For example, our word was extend, so we used the broadest font we could to create the sense of it extending out as far as it could go. We also did them all in caps so that it increased the extension both height-wise and length-wise. The reason we did not use a serif was so that it was more simplified and focused on the breadth of the letters rather than the artistic component of them.
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