Photo Project

I used to take a lot of photography classes in high school and they required me to photograph my environment on a daily basis. So i don't think that this project caused me to experience my environment any differently or see it in a different way since its something i always used to do. However, I think taking photos makes me see things differently than others do. Im more observant, i think about things in terms of how they would appear on camera and I think that in general I am much more observant than others.

My favorite photograph is the picture of my roommates cat lying on the couch upside down. I came to Iowa state this year sort of on a whim and didn't know i was coming until the start of the summer. I had to find a place to live very quickly and looked on craigslist. I ended up finding an apartment with two nice girls my age but one of them had a cat and i had never lived with a cat before. The first semester she bit me a lot and was aggressive and i thought i hated cats but she calmed down and I got used to her playfulness and now i'm really happy that we have a pet in our house, so i thought this photograph perfectly embodied what i wake up to each morning, and the newly discovered nice side to our cat, Yoda.

I like the way that Yoda is looking directly at the camera in this shot, it took me an hour to get the perfect shot where she was looking at me. The light was just right and i thought the blur of her fuzzy body against the fuzzy sofa creates this relaxed feeling that suits the look that Yoda has. She was peaceful and the lighting supported that feeling.

This was also the most difficult photo to obtain, i wanted yoda to be looking at the photo and she is very uncooperative so it was not easy. I think this is also why i like this photo the most because when i look at it, I see all of the effort and trouble i had gone through to get the photo. I have found through my many Photography classes that animals and young children are the most difficult subjects to photograph.

Looking at the photograph which I had mounted, of the small white and pink flowers which had just blossomed on the tree branch, I think it represents my environment well. I am from the east coast, and we have much calmer winters than the past one I experienced here in Iowa. I walked past that same tree every day on my way to school and it was frozen and gloomy and looked dead. So after three months of nonstop snow and wind and just absolutely awful weather, I loved to see those first few flowers bloom on that tree and was eager to capture them and show the environment I had been waiting for all winter. I chose to photograph that same tree that I always see once it looked nice instead of as it looked for the first half of our photo project.