Artist Statement Final

          During my sophomore year here at NHS, I had the pleasure of taking Photography as one of my electives. I am very pleased to say that my expectations were perfect of the class, and they were even exceeded, partly through Mrs. Hahn's great guidance, and also through the allowance of free expression in such class. My blog has been keeping track of my progress as an artist throughout my freshmen year in 2D art, and it was also used this year to track my various assignments in Photography. I can remember all of the assignments we had this year, because of their differentiation and because I could exemplify my voice unto the assignments. I feel as though my blog did a fairly good job of expressing my voice and giving me a very sturdy platform to project my various thoughts and ideas on. Starting in the beginning of the year, I actually ended up taking some of my best images during the fall and during the beginning of my blog as an artist. For example, I can remember our first assignment, using the Rules of Composition (rule of thirds, balancing elements, leading lines, etc.) to improve the quality of our images. Here is my favorite image from that photoshoot:

          Although my blog was unruly and somewhat chaotic at this point, you could see my voice through my images, and my themes were really truly taking form and becoming visible. In this image, you could see that I was breaking the rules of composition by centering my subject, however my composition, contrast, and close and far were very good in this image. This progression continued as we journeyed on in this class and through first semester. Moving on through my blog onto the next big assignment, which I enjoyed as well, was the color composition assignment. My favorite image from this objective is found here: 

     This image was so much better than from the previous assignments, truly showing my progression as a photographer was picking up. I love the textures of the bottles in this picture as it truly created a "blue" theme to the photo. The rhythm in the piece and the balance between the deep indigo bottles and the baby blue fading sky was harmonious in this piece. The value of the grain sticking up through the space was poetic in a sense. This assignment was one of my favorites in the entire year because of its opportunities to use principles of design, like repetition and elements of design like space to create wonderful images. Moving on towards the beginning of second semester, we can see a true leap of quality from decent to great images. This may be my favorite image I took all year long:

      We went into a backroom, allowed to use colored lights instead of the bright LEDs we usually sit around! The blacklight allowed for a purple effect on the setting, as I had set up a orange light to bring in the texture and value of the flower. ISO had to be my favorite assignment all year, simply because it allowed for nighttime photography. My blog did a excellent job of documenting my progress as a photographer by keeping track of my styles and thematic elements in my work. My last images I would like to show go together, being from the same assignment about Juxtaposition:

       During this assignment I was glad to be allowed to set up my scene, projecting my voice onto my juxtaposition pairs, this one being my favorite pair. I love the contrast between the two images, being opposite but yet so much different. I feel as though this artist statement helps you better understand my blog, as well as understand me as an artist. I truly and thoroughly enjoyed this class, and I have recommended and will continue to recommend this class to anyone who is thinking about taking it. I'd like to thank Mrs. Hahn for this year as I loved every bit of it. 

Sincerely, Tyler Cassidy.

In the portraiture assignment, I was required to take 30 planned out portrait pictures that were all very different. This one was my favorite because of the colors and because it is my brother!
I enjoyed this assignment due to it's difficulty and variety of pictures able to be taken with the range of creativity we were given. I wouldn't change anything about this assignment.

 

In the panorama photoshoot, I had to take photos of a place that meant a lot to me, and I decided to take pictures of the place in my neighborhood where the road ends, because I knew it'd look cool and I knew it meant a lot to me. We had to take 15 pictures at 3 varying heights to create one amazing looking panorama. 

In this photoshoot we were required to go to one of the many parks in our area and shoot around, I chose Forest Park because it was close to me and also my favorite park, as I used to spend a lot of my time there as a kid with my friends. This was one of my favorite pictures I took out of the many I did take. The scene was already set for my pictures, I just had to position myself differently to most effectively capture the subjects of my photos. This was a great photoshoot and it was simple, which left a lot of room for voice to be incorporated.

In this photoshoot, food was laid out for us to take pictures of in class. We needed to take 30 pictures to submit, but we needed to take around 7-8 pictures per table out of the 8 tables to get enough good pictures to submit. It wasn't easy however, we needed to rearrange the food to look good and also look edible, which wasn't easy to accomplish. Overall this was a fun assignment to do in class and the images were easy and fun to edit.

In this photoshoot we were supposed to take pictures of a "noun" we selected. I chose flowers as my noun because I enjoy flowers a lot and they are plentiful around Noblesville, especially this time of year. We were required to turn in 30 images, so Mrs. Hahn requested that I expand my noun photos to accompany more nature instead of just close ups of flowers.

In this photoshoot, we took photos of different juxtapositions. I liked doing opposites for the different juxtaposition photos. I thought those were the most fun, and this was the most fun for me. I set my scene carefully, taking time to set each pair of the 15 pairs differently. That took awhile but I'm very happy with how they turned out.

During this photoshoot, we were assigned an artist to imitate and take "parody" pictures of, aka imitate the style of photography our artist specialized in. My artist was Nadar, a 19th century photographer who specialized in photos of nature, portraits and aerial photography from a hot air balloon that he flew around Paris in. Unfortunately I do not have access to a hot air balloon, or a way to take aerial photos. However I could take pictures of nature and portraits, so that's exactly what I did. I edited these pictures in black and white so that they could be similar to Nadar's photos, which were all black and white. These descisions helped me incorporate my voice into this assignment.