In my first collection of photos titled Relationships, I attempted to capture a variety of relationships between different actors present in our world. The nature of the relationships are as diverse as the subjects of the photos, with some being more complex or abstract than others. For example, in the photo of the bee and the flowers, the relationship is natural and obvious: the bee and flower both depend on each other to survive and I have simply captured a moment in which they interact. In others, the nature of the relationship can be physical, as is the case in the picture of the overlapping white flowers in which the two similarly shaped objects physically entangle themselves with each other. A third type of relationship that doesn’t exist in physical space is shown in the picture of the red ring reflected on a window. Here, this aesthetic relationship is only perceived by our eye and works to create a pleasant visual effect. These are but three of the many different kinds of relationships that exist in our world that we don’t always take a look at and there are most likely plenty more in my photos that I didn’t even intend to capture. As is the case with many forms of art, these relationships are what you make of them and I just tried to capture a few that are not commonly seen.
The main technical aspect of this collection that I tried to employ was to photograph photos with small frames of reference. Prior to this class, I have always been drawn to the majestic appeal of landscape photography or the complex interactions within a photo of a crowd of people and had never really been able to get down and change the focus of a photo to something less commonly viewed. I think this attempt to step outside of my comfort zone has really been beneficial as I begin to see things differently. For example, after taking pictures of many of the flora on the basketball team’s ritual walk to the shopping center to get food before late games, I began to observe more levels of the landscape than I previously had.
One glaring technical aspect that needs to be addressed is the image quality of my photos. Most of them are taken with my phone camera and so certain things such as exposure, focus, and aperture are not perfect and sometimes way off which bugs me because sometimes I see a photo that I have taken that would have been nice had it not been so grainy. I also really appreciate any sort of feedback and have decently thick skin so fire away at anything that stands out.
