Line and Texture

I'm a bit behind, so I'm going to combine line and texture. A couple of weeks ago our class focused on line and how you can use line to make a picture seem more "positive" or "negative" or give weight or emphasis to objects in your picture. (A line going left to right in an upward motion will apparently give a positive feel to anyone who read left to right. Countries where they read the opposite will get the positive feel from right to left lines in an upward motion. Or so our teacher says.) Here are a couple of my line pictures:





Last week we discussed texture, which is basically what you'd think (the picture above would be an example of both line and texture). The idea behind texture in photography being that you want your viewer to get a sensory reaction to the picture. I had a much more difficult time finding texture pictures, but had more of them turn out decently. Here are some of those:






This week we're working on portraiture, which I'm afraid I'm no good at. In case you haven't noticed the trend, I seem to tend toward abstract pictures rather than representational. I feel that I never quite get everything working together right in the representational world. And it doesn't help that Gareth always, always, always notices when I'm taking pictures. Or that for some reason he's decided that having his feet/toes photographed is the best thing in the world. After this week we learn about matting/framing and then we get ready for our art show (held at the church) on August 4.

Cafe Rio... to eat or not to eat?

And I quote:

"It is no secret that Cafe Rio is one of the more popular restaurants among BYU students. It is for this reason I felt compelled to write this letter to expose something I found both shocking and saddening. I noticed Cafe Rio uses real Coca-Cola in its recipe for pork barbacoa. That means many of us have disobeyed the commandments of our prophets without even knowing it!

"I am appalled Cafe Rio would perpetuate this subterfuge in Provo. Surely the owners must realize how many of us are striving to uphold the Word of Wisdom. How can we do that when they are secretly giving us real Coke? Now that this despicable deception has been brought to light, I think the only solution that we, as students of the Lord's university, can embrace is to immediately stop patronizing Cafe Rio until it uses caffeine-free Coke in its pork barbacoa recipe.

"Until then, let us eat on campus -- BYU Dining would never serve real Coke. Further, I call on the Honor Code Office to consider whether students who continue to order pork barbacoa should have a place at this university. Surely we cannot have students attending BYU who don't think it's important to follow the prophets. If students insist on eating pork barbacoa at Cafe Rio, they should cede their spot at this university to someone who is willing to be obedient, even when it doesn't suit their carnal tastes."

This was a letter to the editor in the Daily Universe. I laughed my head off. Hope to hear what you have to say!

Should give you a good laugh

I have to say this is the funniest thing I've seen in a while! I'm not really high tech like my siblings, so pardon me for just posting the link. http://www.flickr.com/photos/passiveaggressive/3642661392/

Photography Class

A woman in our ward offers a free seven-week photography course each summer - one of the reasons I was glad we ended up staying here. I've finally purchased a new camera for us, since the idea of trying to shoot for two hours with an obsolete memory card that can hold 36 pictures and a camera that probably uses up batteries in 1 hour didn't appeal to me. (When I looked through the manual for that camera I noticed that they assure the owner that the date function will continue to work after the year 2000. Definitely time for an upgrade.) I decided to stick with a compact camera for now, and went with this one. Happily, it arrived late Monday afternoon, just in time for my class yesterday.

The class is called "Learning Design Through Digital Photography", so we are focusing on how to compose our pictures, with an emphasis on line and texture. Our first assignment was due yesterday, consisting of two pictures each of the following categories of art: representational, abstract, and non-representational. Here are my best of the bunch:

I felt like I had a very difficult time finding abstract photos, but I must do a much better job of taking abstract pictures than representational or non-representational, since our teacher seemed to like these. Hopefully I'll improve in the representational category over the course of the class! Our class yesterday was focused on line, so look forward to some line pictures next week!