Nature that's . . . in an urban setting . . .

I shot these photos one day because the light was just absolutely delicious in this area and I wanted to. It's nature on Trinity campus, so it's sort of urban, but it's mostly just pretty.

Playing

This girl was playing in the water fountain outside the courthouse downtown. She was using her cereal bowl as a boat and playing Poseidon by sinking it and raising it from the depths repeatedly.

Infrastructure

I went downtown to take photos of people and plants, and ended up taking these two as well. They're actually my favorites. And, fortunately, there are sort of plants in both, so they're urban nature.

Downtown Flora

Some downtown flora, plus littering!

Rafters

This is also at La Cantera. I love the fusion of the rafters with the leaves.

Leaves and Light

At La Cantera. I like this image. I don't even feel the need to talk about it.

Many Faces

This little girl was busy making faces at my sister when I walked up to the two of them. So I took pictures of her. If Lacey, my sister, made a happy face, the girl hid. If my sister made a sad face, the girl screeched as if trying to ask her something.

The middle photo, as you can probably tell, is blurred. I blurred it to see if I could make her look like a 1940s movie star. Did it work?

Urban Nature

The combination of the natural with the urban was fun to play with. My favorite is the pole in the midst of leaves and flowers.

Unsuspecting Man

Most of the pedestrians I shot knew I was shooing them. But this guy was really far away and he didn't see me. I thought he was interesting, though, with the leaves behind him and his obvious, obvious boredom.

Balloon Mermaid

The man was making an Ariel the Mermaid balloon for the little girl. She was rapt by his movements. I tried to get the moment when he gave her the completed mermaid, but it was out of focus.

Acorn

For the urban nature assignment, I was going to drive downtown, but as I was passing the portion of Trinity near the admissions office I saw a palm tree I wanted to shoot. While shooting the palm tree, though, I saw this acorn, and became obsessed.

Lacey Allison Barkhurst

This doesn't fit into any assignment, because though I was at the mall shooting pedestrians, this is my sister. She was looking at her phone, an act that can elicit a wider range of emotions from her than anything else on earth. She looks sad. She insists she wasn't. She is a teenager.

Sliders

These are some of the photos I took for the pedestrians assignment. I went to La Cantera, the mall, to take picture of people, and found a playground. There was an epically rousing game of slide going on amongst a group of children who all seemed to have become the best of friends, within the last hour or so. Of their little band, the top one seemed to be a leader. She was a little intimidating. The one on bottom was the smallest of the lot. She was unsure whether she was afraid or amused and above it all.

Photoshop that Cup!

I liked the cup, with the bubbles, from my previous post. However, the background was competing with my bubbles. So I, in primo amateur form, went into photoshop and did weird things. However, it looks better, I think. :P I masked the background and turned it black and white. It was an experiment.

Bird

I apologize for this disturbing image. The reason I photographed it is a long story. First, I once saw a bird die on the ground. It's little eye closed and its little blue body stopped its quick breathing. Ever since then, I cry pretty much whenever I see a dead bird. On top of that, I've always hated the term "still life." It sounds to me like something that died, not something that was never alive. So when I was given a still life assignment, and I saw this bird, I decided to photograph it for my still life assignment. It was sort of a confronting my fears type of thing. Yes, it sounds cheesy. Yes, I am probably more of a verbal person than a visual one.

Girl Jungle

So I had that cup. It had little beads of air on the inside, like happens to water when it's been sitting in a cup overnight. I loved the way they looked, with the great blue of that cup. So I shot the cup. But then I was looking at it, sitting there in the context of my dressing table, and it looked like a jungle of necklaces. So I shot it like that. And, there I am, in the mirror. I didn't notice that originally, but I like how I don't look like I know I'm being photographed (I didn't), so that it looks like someone taking photos of wild . . . cups . . . in a girl jungle.

Ripples

Another scarf. I'm really into texture on the light table.

Pillar Blur

I have to admit, this photo has no photographic value, but it a) looks cool and b) is what I was going for. I wanted to catch the pillars as they changed colors but as I was moving (I was in a car) so tat the colors would blur together and create a continuum. Blue to purple.

Pillars

This is a photo of the pillars downtown that change colors at night. They're a beautiful piece of public art, but they're hard to photograph because you have to get just the right moment, when the pillars are changing colors one by one. I got it as same were red and others pink. It's a little blurry, but the colors are right. :)

Carriage Lights

I didn't get, with this image, what I had hoped to get. I was trying to follow the carriage with my camera, to blur the background but not the carriage or the horse. But instead, everything came out blurry. But I like it because the lights all moved in the same exact way, creating this odd feeling of repetition that reminds me of either poetry or a Christmas tree, and either one is good.

Umbrella

This was done with a 3 second shutter speed, to capture the inconsiderable light. I loved the angle on the fence. I wanted to capture that, and the umbrella added interest.

The Contents of a Purse

This was also from my light table shoot. I liked it because I spent a lot of time arranging the images in the frame. It's also about how the contents of a woman's purse relate to a mask.

Rain

I wanted to capture water on a window, as if it had been raining. And I wanted to create a mood of rain, the feeling when it rains like the world is all one room and everything is comfortable. So I figured books, which can be relaxing sometimes and stressful at others, would be good. I added the tape recorded later, for interest. The lighting I set up using huge flood lights I checked out for a filming project I was doing, which is sort of funny. But the lights allowed me to see the water on the window (which I simulated by the way :)).

Money

I wanted to look at the crinkles on this dollar bill. And so I did.

Scarves, and Masking!

This image is my first attempt at using photoshop's masking functions. I masked the darker scarves and decreased the exposure on just the white scarf, since it was way overexposed, and brought it closer to the texture and detail you can see on the other scarves. This was also on the light table, also meant to be a study in texture.

Light Table

This image was for a still life assignment. It was taken on an editing table, which used to be used to lay out newspapers. It's in the student newspaper newsroom here at Trinity. I like this image because it shows the texture and the layers of the scarf, and because everything in the image is partially transparent/translucent and both reflects light and allows light to pass through it. I love it.

I know it may look like a scanned image, but the cool thing about it is that it isn't. The only work I did on it was to rotate it 90 degrees. Also, I like that the glasses and the mask are both something you put on your eyes, but while one is part of your identity the other conceals it.