Anything But Clothes!

In our ABC (Anything But Clothes) photo shoot, we spent a lot of time and effort into everything - from our outfits, hair and makeup, and the actual pictures itself. In this picture, we are outside and you can see the grass and trees in the background. You can't really tell, but there's a dumpster behind me which fits into our theme of the shoot. We chose to do trash items. Carmen is wearing newspapers, Ava is wearing toilet paper, and I'm wearing a trash bag. These are all items that you would find at the dump and we chose this location specifically for the dumpsters. The models are close to the camera, but far enough to see the outfits that we worked so hard on. For the most part the image is in focus, but on the bottom and the right side, you can see that it's a little blurry. This was done accidentally. I photo shopped this picture up a little bit because it was way too light and there were empty spaces above our heads. I cropped it, changed the contrast, and converted the photo to black and white. We were trying to show the life of those people who have no clothes to wear and spend their time digging through trash to get by. We took an ordinary trash bag and turned it into a dress. And with a little creativity, we made an exotic looking newspaper dress and a flow-y toilet paper gown! It was difficult looking for a picture that I liked enough to put on my blog because one of us would always be blurred out. Or Carmen would do that grunt kind of look with her eyes. But for the most part, I believe that this photo shoot was extremely successful. Me and my group put a lot of effort into this (especially Krystle) and it was definitely rewarding to see this as our end result.

Manjari Sharma

I never really thought that there was too much of a difference between a portrait and a snapshot. I just thought that a picture was a picture and that was that! But by reading the Manjari Sharma article, I learned a lot more about the differences between these two types of photography. This article explained that a snapshot is a a posed picture that really has no meaning. It could be a picture of you and your family taking a picture in front of the new family car and it would be categorized as a snapshot because it is a picture that is somewhat staged and pretty much fake. When I found out that this is what a snapshot is, I figured that a portrait is more of a candid picture. I realized that I was wrong and even a staged picture that you would think would be categorized as a snapshot may actually be a portrait if there is meaning in the photo. A portrait doesn't always have to be candid, but just as long as it has meaning and it isn't staged, then you can give it the title of one.

Manjari Sharma's portraits are amazing. I really enjoyed looking at the pictures of the people that she took in the shower because it shows how vulnerable we are when we're doing something thats comfortable to us. I believe that we are our true selves when no one is around and Manjari showed through her pictures that we don't have to put on a mask for anyone when we are alone. This is a brilliant idea to photograph people in their shower because the intimacy shows that everyone is human, we all have feelings, and everyone has that sensitivity and vulnerability in them - even though we may not think that from the things that we initially see and judge them by.