Final Project Proposal: Universal Landscapes

The terrain of our neighboring planets serve as a hypothetical landscape for what Earth used to be, could have been or what it might become.  Photographs of synthesized planetary landscapes will be presented as a gallery to create a prophetic possibility of the impact of natural and human acts of destruction.

Most Recent Mars Landscapes

can you find the shiny object on mars?

 Studio Space

Mars

Monday afternoon I went out the banks of the Brazos river and collected some dirt for the Mars landscape. I felt it had the best texture and closest color to Mars, and with a bit of color gel on the lights it would look like Mars.

Thursday night I started the molds of the rock. I didn't think I would use the mold's for the mars display but knew I probably would for the other planets that had more of a rocky landscape. So I wanted to go ahead and test the molds and see how they would hold up and look in and out of water. After leaving them overnight, I came in Friday night to check the molds. The large molds ripped a hole in the large rock one, but I think I can still reuse the mold with a bit of duct tape fix. I clean the molds up by shaving excess down.

 Saturday morning I went to buy paint, since earlier in the week hobby lobby was out of it. Fortunately the new shipment came in, so I got it and picked up some scrap cardboard to act as a base for the foreground for Mars. I spray painted the rocks, and took them back up to the studio space due to bad weather to let them dry.

 

For my setup I used combination of foam and cardboard to act as a base for the foreground of the landscape.

My Setup

Atmosphere
This was my first run through of doing a landscape with this set up and I learned alot to help prep me for the next photoshoot. One of the first things I experimented with was atmospheric look. The first image is with just clear pure water, and the second image is with dirt/clay in the water. I believe I added too much dirt this time around, so the next round I plan on using much less, but I don't want to leave the water clear, I believe the dirt in the water added more depth to the scene.

Clear Water

Water with dirt

Lighting
Next I experimented with the lighting. I realized I need more lights. I'm trying to keep my light limit down since it's very dangerous having lights near a water tanks. So for the next round I plan on using 1 v light at the far corner in the room away from the tank with heavy sand bags to help light the foreground, then use the desk lamp to light the water.  Overall I'm trying to get a soft diffuse light for the landscape so it's not stylized and looks more natural to the environment.

Composition
Composition is where I needed the most work on, and 2 major issues I ran into. One was the atmosphere, there was too much dirt in the water so it was hard to see the silhouette in the background since the water was too muddy. Because of that, I couldn't push the rock that much back without it completely disappearing as well.  It takes about 40 minutes to completely empty the tank and clean it out, so I ran out of time to experiment again, but lesson learned. Another issue was not having enough large rocks. I had too many small rocks that disappeared in the tank behind the dirt horizon, thus I couldn't get much depth. Sunday I paid another visit to the banks of the Brazos river and collected a large bucket full of rocks, mostly sandstone, petrified wood (good for silhouettes and other planet landscapes) and some sort of brown jade-ish rock.

Result & Future Plan
Out of this series, I believe this was the most successful image. But I am not done with Mars. I plan on doing another shoot of Mars with the lessons I learned from the first shoot. My main focus is to get a better landscape of Mars down, which should be much easier to do with alot less dirt in the water and larger rocks to work with to build the set.

Foster: Feminism

Foster: Feminism Presentation

Setting Up a Studio Space

 This past week I spent setting up the studio space and gathering supplies for the mars landscape photography. The color dark room I'm using needed a bit of clean up before I could use it, so I spent the first part of the week cleaning it. There were two enlargers that I had to move out of there to make space for the aquarium. The room was used previous spring semester as a screen print room, so I had to clear out the supplies that were left from that and find previous owners since there were large materials left behind. Once the room was cleared out, I was able to start bringing supplies in.

Friday night I brought up the aquarium. I got measurements for how large of a hose I need to fill water from the sink, as well as the diameter to fit over the faucet nozzle. After a quick trip to Home Depot, I did a test run to make sure I could fill the tank with water and siphon water out of the tank. Test was successful.

While I had the tank partially filled with water, I went ahead and put an object I had in the tank to get test shots to determine what lens I will be using.  My 18-55mm, 3.5-5.6 Nikkor lens yielded the best results.

I also made a trip to Hobby Lobby to get supplies for the mars landscape. I got foam, foam glue and tools to sculpt as a base for the landscape. I also got foam board (one side white and one side black), as well as cotton and craft glue for sky background. This probably won't be used for Mars landscape, but I needed the white background to block the wall out. In addition I got plaster and rock molds to make the canyon look. I couldn't find the right color to paint the molds with, so I'll be stopping by hobby town after work on Tuesday and hopefully will have better luck. Also I came across a silver dust base that would work great for the future Jupiter or Neptune landscapes.

 Doing some test runs, I realized I needed some supplies that I didn't prepare for such as towels, newspaper, bowls, and possibly an extra table for more counter space which was a great run through to prep for the project. For my mars landscape I'll also be using reddish dirt clay from the Brazos river banks, so I'll be heading out Monday after class/work to go collect it. I hope Monday night to prep the rock plaster molds as well after collecting the dirt. I hope for next week to have a good portion of the mars landscape built with some test photography done to start prepping atmospheric looks and lighting.

Lacan’s Mirror Stage

1.       A stage that occurs as a young child identifies with his own image (“ideal ego” or “ideal-I”).

2.       This act marks the primordial recognition of one’s self as “I” before entrance into language and the symbolic order.

3.       The Mirror stage establishes the “imaginary order” which still influences the subject even after the subject enters the symbolic order. The imaginary order is basically narcissism; the subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire.

Ideas

1.       Strap a hero camera via head mount to a baby and record the baby’s day from his perspective. Go through the footage afterwards and look for objects the baby focused on. Possibly relate the video to fetishes to represent the imagery order that gets established in the Mirror stage.

2.       Record video of a baby in front of a mirror. Record his facial expressions, via actual face and the reflected image. Juxtapose both images together.

3.       Take baby toys and compare them with sexual toys. Ironically, many sexual toys are similar to baby’s toys, which suggest the imaginary order that gets establish. When babies are around certain objects in the mirror stage, for some unexplained reason later on life those objects somehow influence that same human’s fetishes through the imaginary.

Sketch 5: Finalizing Idea & Space

Idea
So the two ideas I came down to was eco tragedies and planetary environments. After many internal debates, I decided to settle on planetary ideas. I do plan on continuing my work to do eco tragedies, but I feel those environments are more complicated and take more time to set up than the planetary ones. So to be able to have one environment finish for the end of the semester, I believe time constraint wise planetary environment was the correct choice while eco tragedies can be done next semester. I have passion for both ideas, so I figured doing the planetary one was a good one to start out initially since it seems a little less complicated than the eco tragedies. I hope in the long run I can do a series of all the planets, then focus on earth with the eco tragedies.

 For the first photo series, I plan on doing Mars. There's been plenty of documentation on Mars of course and we do know what it looks like and I think it would be a great way to start out as to get the process down for this photographing technique. I can easily make canyons out of red dirt and test some atmospheric effects in the tank as well with some color gels on lights and fog in water.

Once I get that series down and more comfortable with the technique, I plan on doing either Neptune's or Jupiter's surface (hopefully both if time allows!) for the end of this semester. Both planets are very similar in terms of surfaces, both planets have a rocky core with a very gaseous atmosphere. Jupiter is made up of rocky core and the main bulk of Jupiter consists liquid metallic hydrogen. There is 90% of hydrogen and only 10% of helium on the Jupiter.  Neptune is also made up of rock and ice but there is nearly 15% of hydrogen in its atmosphere. Both planets have little rocky core and is mostly gaseous. Since they are gaseous, I figure for these planets it would be great to get the underwater smokey effect, which would also this series would make a great candidate for video. The materials would consists of water, gaseous liquid looking effect, possible electric bolts, dye, clouds, lights, boards and rocky material.

Space
I needed a dark space close to a sink where I could siphon water in and out of the aquarium without having to move it around. I figured one of the old dark rooms on the 4th floor was the perfect space that I could use. I talked to Bill to see if it was ok that I used one of the rooms for this project, and he gave the approval for one of the color darkrooms for this semester! So the next week or two I will be cleaning out one of the color darkrooms and set up my project space.  Monday night I will be doing a liquid test with the old aquarium I have to make sure it can hold liquid, then I'll be setting that up in the space if it pass hopefully end of the week. I'll be spending this week gathering supplies for the Mars series, and start doing some smokey FX tests in the meantime.