IkennaPhotography

For the found objects Brief, this Idea originated from my love for the work of Vincent Laforet and his book AIR. Knowing fully well that I couldn’t realistically recreate his work without owning a drone or breaching the terms of this brief, I decided that I would use circuit boards to do it. So After acquiring one circuit board, I proceeded to turning my room into a photo studio switching off all lights and placing the circuit board on some black paper I had put on my desk. After taking a few shots that where shaky I realised that to achieve any level of detail I needed a tripod stand for the camera. upon getting this photos where now coming along better however the shots I personally felt were all a bit boring. So to really own the night time effect I changed the settings completely and mounted the board on two stacks of books leaving enough space under for my lamp. With the board now lit from the bottom I was getting more interesting pictures. In a lot of the pictures in Vincent Laforets AIR he only focuses on a small part of the city so I did the same putting the focus of the camera on one bit normally in the middle. After taking these pictures to my satisfaction I decided to polish them in Photoshop. Adding colour to them, increasing contrast, playing with Hue and saturation levels where all a part of the process in producing this work.

For the Home brief I had to really look at what I defined as home. Haven been in boarding school since year 7 when I was 12 all through till now where I am miles away from my house in Nigeria, the one constant living far away from home has been family, I’ve come to learn that the difference between a house, and a home is the presence of those who can share in your joy, happiness, anger, sadness etc. The meaning of home for me is the presence of family and not of any physical construct. And with that definition of home I was able to see the possibility of the existence of home without a specific location, or the sense of permanency attached to it in that form. So upon hearing of one of my cousins new births, I decided to pay her with my camera. Sighting inspiration from black and white photojournalism photographer Mary Ellen Mark, whose pictures I thought managed to capture emotion in its most basic form. It was the rawness of expression in her pictures that prompted me to make mine black and white. As I couldn’t take lighting equipment into the hospital I had to work with horrible fluorescent light which now that I think of it makes me appreciate the black and white decision even more.

For portraiture, the first portrait of myself I took in a photo studio. Using red jells on both sides almost completely sideways to create contrast based on my facial contours. The self timer setting was on 10 seconds, enough time for me to get in front of camera and maintain that pose. The shutter speed was fast so as to counter any unnecessary movement. The second portrait, the familiar face, is of my friend Matthew. For this one I decided to attempt using the environment to create an interesting background that stood out as obviously not a photo studio, but maintained a level of simplicity and regularity that kept the main focus on the subject. It is that simplicity of the surrounding that informed my decision not to blur the background as I dint feel there was enough detail in it to belittle the main subject (Matthew). The final and most challenging portrait was of a complete stranger named Aaron. A graphic design student I met on my way to the library one night. He was heading into the design building when I asked him to be involved in the project. The awkwardness of the moment accompanied by the essence of humour made for a rather strange facial expression on the balcony of the building where I had already set up some lighting.

For the appropriation brief I chose to take basic pictures of sunsets and gave them a less realistic and more aesthetic and cartoonish feel. To achieve that I decided to turn them into pixel art. So in my research I discovered the work of pixel art animator, Paul Robertson. After watching multiple tutorials on how to convert regular images into pixel art, I loaded a series of images unto Photoshop. A major step in converting the picture to pixel art involved reducing the number of colours or colour shades that where in the image, so before doing that I altered the levels of each image, increasing their saturation levels to counter the dulling effect the later stages of the process would have. After that I proceeded to increasing the contrast to a level where I felt would aid the selection of shades and colours without jeopardising the overall look of the images by making them look to harsh. To finally convert the images, in indexed colour on Photoshop, I reduced the number of colours used in each picture according to my liking, trying out different figures to different results, moods, etc. One thing I noticed was that the lower I went in number of colours used, them more computer chose a particular one until I hit about 15 colours max and the images started to turn black and white. That was all for the palette. The final steps included adjusting the diffusion rate to where I felt it looked most like natural hand drawn pixel art. And lastly I resized all the pictures to literally bring out the pixels. This depended on how big the images where to start of with, but the process was the same for all of them, I would reduce their sizes significantly in pixels, then experiment increasing them in percentage. This was what really made the difference in terms of how pixelated the first picture of the blue sunset looks in comparison to the second picture of the fisher man where the sense of reality is lost without it being as dramatic as the first.

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