Diabetes

For school we had to shoot a photo that has to do with diabetes. Here are two shots I came up with:

We had a diabetic girl talk to our class about what it's like to have diabetes. One thing she mentioned was that she had to take a needle before every meal. This is kind of what it felt like to me.

I know it's really common to see diabetes pictures linked with images of sugar, but I really thought it would be neat to make an actual scale out of sugar itself. It was hard work!

REAL Gingerbread.

Last month, Kevin, the redhead, joked and said that he was going to be a piece of bread for halloween. I really didn't get the joke at first.

De-familiarizing familiarity.

I don't know how many people have tried this, but when I'm bored of all the familiar things all around me, I like to try some mind tricks. If you focus your thoughts well enough, you can trick your mind for a little while into seeing familiar things as if you're seeing them for the first time. Or maybe you're not really tricking your mind, but just realizing how bizarre some things really are. Either way, has anyone ever had some fun with this? I like to have fun with this trick when I'm bored. It works great with hands and feet, or even bigger things like trees and their shape, and how they grow. You can see how unusual anything really is if you think hard enough about it. The shapes of things, or what they mean to us as human beings, the way things were created by nature or the way human beings created thing. In a sense it's almost like questioning things and all their detail. Anyways, another thing which this relates to is language and words. If you repeat any word about 10 times, you'll start to be more aware of how strange it really sounds. I think this one happens to everyone though, and it makes me laugh. I've always wondered how strange the English language sounds to somebody who isn't familiar with it!

Spaceman Sam

For our commercial photography class, one of our most recent assignments was to shoot something using a "cookie" light (the real term is “cukaloris”). Basically it's a type of gobo, which is when you use objects, shapes or cut-outs and put them in front of a light source to create light or shadow shapes on your photograph. For my photograph I cut out stars from bristol board, painted a few small styrophome globes and hung them, and included a little space man named Sam. I had a lot of trouble making the stars look sharp, and they kept doubling. It was pretty bad, that I actually blended two photos together to make the stars alright (this version) and in the photo above, I actually had to align and erase some of the stars in photoshop.