Scrapbook # 1

Over the course of this semester, I hope to use this blog for many things! Today I’m using it for Scrapbook entry #1

I’m currently taking a class called Visual Rhetoric.  The idea is to study the persuasive effect of an image or group of images.  For my own purposes, I hope to learn how to couple images, perhaps in the form of a website, with text to make useful presentations, designs, etc…

Part of our recurring work will be to do these scrapbook assignments, where we pull images of a certain type and analyze them.  This is my Scrapbook entry #1 – in which we study the way light plays some significant role in the image.  Since I’m not not all that visually creative, I took this to the extreme and most of my pictures involve the use of light in making shadows.

Hidden Nature

I’m amazed at how shadows can not only affect our way of viewing an object, but make that object into something else entirely. This crab claw, at just the right angle to the sun, becomes a swan!

Irony

This picture was taken in the Mount Vernon High School Chorus room. The shadows capture the effect of piano keys on the floor, an amusing irony.

Up and Down or In and Out?

Mostly just because I think it’s cool!

Caught from 20 stories above, I love how the shadows become full sized people (maybe a bit taller than full!) When you focus on it, it’s hard to decide if the ground is a canvas with shadow figures on it, or are these shadows just walking into or out of the ground?