Photos, prints, book, exhibit

This project was quite the process for me. For the Something is Happening photos project, I really did not have many ideas going into it, and I ended up taking photos of the whiteboards in my residence building and other buildings on campus. I like the concept I had in mind, because something quirky about Draheim is that the residence is kind of a ghost town - nobody really interacts with one another much, and few people live in the building compared to other residences on campus. The one place where people are constantly engaging with one another is on the whiteboards, particularly the one on the wall in the 2nd floor restroom. There's always a super funny mix of messages like "good luck on midterms! :)" or "believe in yourself <3" and then there's "SOMEBODY LEFT THEIR BLOODY TAMPON IN THE SHOWERS! FUCK YOU AND I HOPE YOU FAIL YOUR FINALS." I think it's pretty funny that that's the way we've all chosen to communicate. 

A particularly intense day for the whiteboard

The execution was not quite satisfactory for me, though. I didn't check out a camera in time before the weekend, so I used my iPhone 7 camera which isn't the best. There was glare in most of the pictures of whiteboards, because I couldn't get all the room lights to turn off since the switches are automatic. Overall, I wasn't very satisfied with the quality of the photos I showed the class, so for my Blurb book, I used my favorite photos of colorful mushrooms that I'd taken between two hikes in the past year or two. Nayla recommended that I use a grey background for the pages and I think that really worked out, and even though the book was expensive, I like that I'll always have this collection of my photography. I think I'll give it to my parents to keep because it's pretty high quality.

For the photo exhibit in Wriston, I took the advice of Johnie and a couple other classmates and went with the red mushroom photo. Composition-wise that was probably the best, even if I preferred the yellow mushrooms to the red ones. I came up with the title "Bitten" on the spot, because of all the bite marks in the mushroom. Honestly, when I was taking photos of the mushrooms, it sort of bothered me that so many of the mushrooms had holes or bite marks or slits in them, but I think that's part of the charm. I called the book "Sneaky Shrooms" because on one of the hikes, my brother described the mushrooms as "sneaky" because of how they blended in, and was impressed at how quick I was at spotting mushrooms from a distance. 

"Bitten"