Street Art Candid Spots

For my photography project, genre based, I'm going to be using street art and candids. I used my fisheye camera to take the photos!

Some elements of candids are taking pictures 'in the moment' when no one knows their photo is being taken or otherwise are unaware of it. Something like this would be classified as candid portrait art:

I also think you can find candid art in street art, which is what I did. This can have landscapes, objects, and people in all the photos. What I wanted to do was capture the decisive moment even while in the fast paced city of Asheville, North Carolina. I thought these photos were kind of like what I wanted to take:

Inspired Part 2

This is the second part of my first blog, Inspired Part 1, and this time I'm going to share some photos I took around my house. Christmas time is one of my favorite times of year, so when my mom starts to get excited and decorate, suddenly my house is spotted with red and greens and angels. 

The plethora of these fake candles are in every room of the house, out of every window, and when you drive up the road to my house you can see them as you come. I absolutely love them even if they're a pain to turn on and off every night.

And then there's Lilly.... my mom decks her out in the football jersey and her own santa bed just for the holidays. It's adorable.

My mom's own homemade creation of a pinecone tree. I assisted in the picking of the pinecones (with a lot of complaining). Nonetheless it's still a gorgeous piece and fits well with the rest of the house.

A close up of my mom's hand glitter painted pinecones. I loved how the light shone off of these.

I hate his little creepy thing. It sits on that bench in the foyer until I put it in the basket next to it. It's creepy! You can barely see her face!

Inspired Part 1

What inspired me to create my pinhole, or just inspires me in general? I think music is probably where I find most of the quotes that I write on my arms in ink. The greatest part of music is that there is just so much of it... and it's all just whimsical writing put to song. The words are what brings me happiness and excitement.

So some bands that I love the words, or sound, most are what inspired me to write them on my pinhole. My favorite band (I got to see them live over the summer!) MGMT, has made not only a sighting on my pinhole but on my walls as well:

I also am very inspired by the lyrics that Ed Sheeran writes. He has such a beautiful style of writing and it's just fantastic to listen to. I wish I could be able to put that into some form of art someday. The last thing that inspired the making of my pinhole was the picture of a tree. I've drawn it on my wall as well as on my pinhole, and I'm still not sure as to why the tree inspires me, but I think it may have something to do with eternity and growth. 

Pinhole

The pinhole camera, to me, seemed like a completely new way to view how we take pictures. With the pinhole camera, we become a tripod with it in our hands, holding the small lens cap open to expose our film on the inside. It's going to be so interesting to see what we come up with, with our new cameras!

I'm very excited to use the pinhole, and I'm trying to think of something to take with it to get a good picture. So I set out onto the lovely internet and tried to find some pictures that would inspire me and here is what I'd found.

I picked these two different types of shots used with the pinhole because I wasn't really sure what mine would come out like. I want to be prepared to see maybe the circle around my image, or maybe it'll be like the one on top of that, and be a clear sepia style. I just don't know yet.

I love both of them because they are interesting in their own way. A normal picture of someone's house wouldn't have been such a good picture if it hadn't been taken with something as obscure as the pinhole camera. The field as well, we see them all the time, but what makes them interesting is knowing that a small little camera that we built ourselves took that image, and that's just damn cool.

Plastic Cameras that Frustrate Us

I don't know if anyone else has realized this, but the Holga camera can be a bit of a frustration. It took me a couple of tries to figure out the settings and that you have to take the lens cap off since you can't see it since you are looking through a different lens.

I do, however, love the Holga camera. The edge blur and the way that it is uniquely itself really is interesting and fun to try to understand all in itself. The Holga is a plastic, sort of toy of a camera, but it is lovely in its own, and it makes me feel so much more of an artist with it in my hands (although none of my pictures really are what I thought they'd be this try). I will try again to see if I can at least get a simply decent shot... we'll see.

A few Holga pictures I really liked:

The edge blurring and the way the smoke comes out of the towers on this one really looked cool!

I like how this artist used the multiple exposure on the same image, it looks amazing!

The water looked interesting coming at us!

I'm also very, very relieved to see that other people had the vignetting on the image like I did...

Converse

When I think of the things that inspire me I think about all the different photographers and their shots, but I also think of the fashion models and beauty that people are portraying daily. I'm in love with converse, Urban Outfitters (not a joke, I haven't bought anything from anywhere else in the last few shopping trips), and the high fashion designs.

I wanted these shoes so badly for my birthday, but they didn't have my size. Any type of UK, Union Jack clothing I'll be sure to be in love with it. I love the flag, and I love the country. Besides the amazing shoes that converse made (that i'm still hoping to buy someday!) there is my absolute favorite British designer, Jack Wills.

Besides many other designers from England, I love Urban Outfitters. I literally live in that store and it inspires me to be creative like they are in their clothes. I wish I had the creativity to do what they can.

I don't think that just photographers can be inspirational. 

Installation Artists

The installation artist that I remembered the most and really inspired me was Andy Goldsworthy. Although the video we watched made him seem kind of strange, he was really interesting and his art was absolutely amazing! My favorite had to be the one above.

The way he used what he found in the wilderness to make his art. The tree inside of the rocks, almost like a grave, was not only clear and a beautiful photograph, but weird and interesting in its own. 

Another picture I really liked: 

This is just amazingly done. The way he used different size icicles and then managed to put them together is wonderful. I wish I could make something as beautiful as this. 

Andy Goldsworthy really inspired me to make a sculpture rather than just putting pictures on something. I am going to put my pictures on cutouts of people, and put all different types of faces, arms, bodies, etc and make them in a circle. I am going to put "We are all Connected" on the connecting pieces to show that we are all the same people and that we are all connected in some way. 

One last astonishing picture to end my post:

This summer I spent a lot of time riding and taking pictures of horses. When I wasn't in the saddle, I was taking pictures of the landscape and the horses and their riders. A few of these are from a roll a film I shot in July at a horse show. I really enjoyed trying to capture a few unexpected moments and to practice depth of field and other things too. Horses are wonderful things to take pictures of, and it was a lot of fun!

The highlight of my summer was getting to have a riding lesson with olympic dressage competitor, Betsy Steiner! I will be having another lesson from her soon, it was really amazing to learn from her  and see how she teaches and works!

Along with horses I went up on a college tour with my mom and aunt! I saw Wellesley, Amherst, Brown, Smith, and Boston University. I really enjoyed seeing the colleges and figuring out what I liked and didn't.

Welcome to my blog! :)