Yuyang Hu

Creator: Yuyang Hu

Project: Enjoy the nature in the era of information explosion

 

Concept for the diptych

In my photo diptych project, I used images that have obvious contradistinction with each other to present how people receive piecemeal information from their digital devices and how they really enjoy themselves in nature when free from the digital world. The two pictures respond to each other mainly in a contrasting way. I used contrast colors in each photo to present their difference. Besides hue, I also tried to make the compositions of the two pictures look similar, so that the audience may find some connections through the structure.

I would claim that the research comes from my observation in daily life. Nowadays people tend to spend a lot of time on their digital devices such as their phone and laptop, but they don’t seem really happy with it, or we can say that people can’t get real happy feelings by watching piecemeal information via electronic devices. On the other hand, when aiming to spend time with family or friends, most people would choose to go to a park or other outdoor sites to enjoy nature. While cutting off from their phones, people can feel true happiness.

 

Process

(1) Process in staging and photographing part I

I went to Century Park with my model and found some places with dense plants, and took some pictures of a girl laughing in nature. When taking the photos, I guided the model to express her happy emotion by laughing and having big movements. I took a lot of pictures and later picked the most satisfying one with the girl having a big smile in the middle of some plants, and has a good composition.

Then I used Photoshop to make some adjustments to the hue and articulation of the photo. I made green to be the most obvious color in the picture, in order to draw a contrast to the other photo, whose overall hua will be red.

 

(2) Digital process in creating part II image

Describe and assess the most significant steps you have taken, problems you encountered, solutions you found and compromises you

ended up making. Include images of different iterations if you have any. When editing the second image, I tried to combine different images of “hands holding a phone” into the picture. First I encountered some technical issues, for I couldn’t successfully select the hand and phone without having other elements, and I learned to use erasers to “clean” the layer mask to solve the problem. At the beginning of my editing, I used the same picture of a hand holding the phone and used it several times to show that people use phones too much time, but I found that particular image repeated so many times and the final effect was not satisfactory. So I took some more pictures of hands holding phones and used them in my picture to make the frame look more dynamic. I also chose different colors for different hands to show that the information that people can get from their phone is vivid. And the fact that the colorful lights surrounding hands and phone will make the audience of this picture feel that the information was dazzling.

 

Conclusion: improve the project

During the in-class critique session, I received some suggestions from my classmates and professor, which I found very valuable. According to the Gestalt Theory, it is better to have some repeating elements in the two pictures. My professor encouraged me to make some digital devices appear in the first picture for there are a lot of them in the second picture, so if the girl in the first picture can hold her phone while smiling without looking at her phone, the two pictures could have a more obvious connection. I found it makes a lot of sense, and I think it would be interesting if the girl in the first picture can throw her phone away, because it can show that she doesn’t need the phone at all. However, that might be difficult to achieve.

 

Image of Diptych

I want to pick the experience of my first trip with my friends at university to Jiaxing, Zhejiang province. To be more specific, is the memory of watching the Qiantang River Tide in Haining. In Haining, we wandered along the bank of Qiantang River and waited for the tidewater that come from the East China Sea to the Qiantang River in the Bay of Hangzhou. 

At the beginning, the air was quiet because the water water level is low, and the river bottom is almost exposed. The only sound was created by us, the only four visiters in the park, stpping on the stone ground. Then we hear some thander-like sounds coming from away, and gradually reaching us. It was the sound of sea water rushing into the river, and it gets louder and louder with the tide approching us.

In the beginning of this article, the author mentioned the concept of “fluidity of the digital”. According to Ritchin, “[w]e are also rediscovering the initial meaning of ‘photography,’  ‘writing with light,’ in which the writing could consciously embrace the widr discourse of opinion after it finished its transition period of simulating the earlier appearance of objectivity” (11). This refers to the fact that when people started to reconstruct photos using the computer to make them easier to manipulate and quickly transmit, photos became less and less reliable. Pixels can be changed and the final version of a photo that the public can view may be completely different from the original one, in terms of the meaning the photographer wanted to convey.

There’s an example in the article that helps us further understand the meaning of “fluidity of the digital”. Ritchin pointed out the manipulation of images could cause an influence on genetic modification by saying that “[i]f you like the way you look with blue eyes in a photographic-style image, then genetic modification may seem less frightening” (12). That is to say the growing trend of using computer softwares to operate photos and the increasing acceptance of manipulated photos by the public, is actually gradually reducing our rejection of false information. As the public receives more transformed photos, people will gradually lose the ability of dialectical cognition and begin to accept this one-sided or out of context information.

To reflect on the extent to which photography is capable of capturing reality, I think first of all we need to confess that the original picture, and the moment that the shutter was pressed, the picture itself is really close to reality. Then we have to pay attention to the computer softwares that enables people to operate on those photos. As Ritchin mentioned in the article, editors, publishers, and whoever can manipulate photos before they were published, can make some changes on the photo to convey things they want the public to see, instead of the original photo. What’s more, I think the fact that changing some features of a photo can change people’s understanding of that photo is related to the viewing habits of human beings. When seeing a picture, we always have a routine of placing our eyes. And the manipulators use this feature of the human eye to reconstruct pictures to lead people’s attention to particular things in the picture. Compared with other media and technology, I think photography is the most user-friendly one, since it presents the information intuitively. However, the easy-to-understand attribute of photography also made it the target tool of spreading fake or false information. As a result, people should think critically when they are trying to learn something new from a picture.

Your Name, Title of Music, Artist Name
B. Concept and Design
Briefly describe your concept and the thought process behind your design.
How do you think your design reflects Gestalt theory and figure/ground relationship? Address how One Black Square
inspired or influenced your design. Describe what principle (similarity, proximity, closure, figure/ground) you
attempted to explore in designing the poster.
C. Process
Describe and assess the most significant steps you have taken, both in terms of failures and successes. How did the
mid-critique influence your design decisions? What kind of changes did you make? Include images of different
iterations if you have any.
D. Conclusion
How would you improve your project if you had more time?
E.  Image of Project
Please post an image of your project.

I would like to create a diptych with 2 photos that have big contrast with each other. I believe if the 2 photos are obviously different from each other, they can attract audiance’s attention in a short time and then let them think about the meaning. The overall topic of my project would be industrialization and nature.

I’m planning to saperate my photos to two groups. One group is about people’s life in the era of industrial civilization. For this group, I would take some photos about our busy life, like buildings, cars, and other objects that conveys our fast pace lifestyle. For the other group, I would take some photos about people having relaxing time in the nature and enjoying their life. In these photos, I want to express that when interacting with nature, people can slow down their pace and enjoy themselves.

Talking about using Photoshop, I will cut out the items in the first group of photos and paste them into a picture. I will also color this picture to make it as different as possible from another picture. I hope that the composition of the two pictures can echo each other to a certain extent, so I will pay attention to this when putting the photos together.