PhotoFor phase four, I was set on combining photography with other art forms. At first I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I went to the meeting to show my proposal with an idea that wasn't fully formed yet. With the help from the people I brought and Andrew, I was able to have an idea that I really liked and wanted to do, and was do able. The idea was to take a photo and then draw on top of it. When searching for my materials, I knew I wanted to used a white Sharpie, but it wasn't until I thought about how I was planning on drawing directly on the photo that I thought about what would happen if I messed up, that is where the plastic came in. I thought that I could draw what I wanted on a regular piece of paper then put that underneath the plastic to trace, and it worked. And I'm glad I did it, I had messed up multiple times trying to draw different animals. Overall though, I am very pleased with the final product. WritingLink to writing I chose to write poems because it is something that I like to do but need to get better at. The reason I wrote multiple was because I wasn't sure which type of poem would suit me best, and I felt as though I needed to know more about the types of poems if I wanted to get better at writing them. ReadingFor this phase I chose to read a book about art history. I chose to read a book like that because as much as I love art, and can look at it for hours, I don't know a lot of the history behind it, and I felt that was a problem. How could I know so little about something that is a huge part of my life? And so I went to Jeff Robin in the pursuit of books, and did he come through. In total he gave me three big books, one about The Last Judgement by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, and the other two about art history in general. Unfortunately, I was unable to completely read the entirety of all three books, but I read a bit of all of them. I feel that I learned a good amount from the books.
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Phase Four UpdateThis week was productive for my phase four project. I was able to get most of the materials I need to complete it, and was able to plan where, when, and what my photo is going to be. This week my goal was to gather all of the materials I needed and to go out and take my picture, I feel that I accomplished this pretty well seeing as I did everything I wanted to do. This weekend I am going out to take a picture for my final, I am planning on drawing on top of multiple shots, and this weekend I am taking a naturey green shot, and on the 7th of June I am supposed to go snorkeling to take a second.
(My group is looking for our photo, but it was lost on the computer it was put on, I will put it on this post as soon as we find it)
Link to Phase 4 Proposal Meeting Reflection: To the meeting I came with an idea that had not quite been formed to the fullest. There were still a lot of details missing and I wasn’t 100% sure whether I wanted to go through with that particular idea or not. But I had my proposal done and so I brought it to get much needed feedback. And am I glad I did, I was given a lot of good feedback and was asked questions that made me think about how I was going to approach the final phase of the project. I had the idea to write a poem that is based off of my final product, with it I intend to add detail and make sure to incorporate the use of the five senses into my writing versus just how it looks. I also wanted to read a nonfiction book about art, mostly the renaissance. I have not found the book that I want to read yet, but my teachers said they’d help me. In my final photo, I wanted to incorporate different art forms and different printing mediums. My meeting helped me decide and finalize what I wanted to do. My final decision was to take a picture, and then draw on top of it to create a scene within the picture. I have four different ideas for the pictures so far, two of them are pictures I took while in Italy, one is a fairly blank canvas, there is a big empty space in front of a church and a bright red car in front of the church. The second one is the top of some buildings and the top half a blue sky. The third and fourth are pictures that I would have to take. The first I want a clearing in the middle of a nature surrounded place, and the second, a close up of someone’s face. On the camping trip my group, Zoe, Maddie, and I were taking landscape pictures. We captured the milky way with many different landscapes. We had it over the lake, with trees in front, and mountains. Taking the picture was quite tiring, we ended up pulling an all nighter, but I'll get into that story later. We started taking pictures at 11 pm across the lake and returned to the campsite an hour later because we couldn't see the milky way that well yet, but little did we know, we were facing the wrong way. At 1 am we headed back out to the lake and started again thinking that it just hadn't risen enough, but after a few pictures, we were confused. I had a star app that we looked up the location of the constellation Cygnus, which is in the middle of the milky way, but the pictures weren't turning out how we wanted. Then just on a gut feeling I turned the camera behind us to take a picture, and there it was! I then told everyone we were with because we weren't the only ones struggling to find the milky way. After we tired of the landscape we had, we moved down the path further and further, until we ended on the other side of the walk way, opposite of our campsites. We then spent a good hour or so taking final pictures until we decided to retire.
Now the story of our all nighter. We were up playing uno and other card games and just talking and telling stories until it was time to take pictures, 11 o'clock. We take pictures for an hour or so and head back to our campsite. From there we decide to go back at 1 and take pictures until 3. So when 1 rolls around we stop what were doing and go take pictures. Instead of just taking pictures until 3, we end up taking pictures until more like 4:30. By then were all tired and want to go to sleep, but we come back to the campsite and some one says, "I want to stay up until sunrise", and being teenagers we are all for it and bet against each other on who will fall asleep. And so we're all talking and having fun, fighting to stay awake and freezing. Then we all move to go lay on the dock. Now granted this dock moves and is pretty wobbly, so being the tired people we were, we were rocking it back and forth as hard as we could without falling off. Eventually we end up all laying down looking at the stars, and we stay like that for a good half hour. We start to move, struggling to stay awake, trying to get comfortable. When finally the sky starts turning orange and red, and purple and pink. The sky kept getting lighter and lighter, but no sun. When we finally realize. We can't see the sun from where we're sitting. We then proceed to raise our voices a little at the person. But then we go over to where we can see the sun and watch it for a little bit, and walking makes us realize we aren't tired anymore, so we went fishing until 9:00 am. After that we went to sleep. Monday we had open work time. Tuesday we worked on our astronomy hit list. On Wednesday continued on our hit list. On Thursday we started epoxying more pictures and had open work time. On Friday we epoxied more photos and made our tent groups, packing lists, figured out tents, and food for our camping trip. Humanities/ChemistryThe object that my group is going to capture is the milky way. The milky way starts rising at 11:00 and will be fully over head at 3:00. We will need to be facing between NE and E. We will locate the milky way by finding the constellation Cygnus.
Link to packing list Monday we had open work time. Tuesday we started a writing piece for humanities and made slime in chemistry an started a writing piece about that. On Wednesday we printed more photos. On Thursday we watched an episode of the Cosmos and had a writers workshop for our writing piece in humanities. On Friday we had work time and debriefed the episode of the Cosmos and started a writing piece about it. HumanitiesHow does the work of scientists, artists, and philosophers lead to wonder and curiosity? Their work leads you to wonder what their thought process was when they created it, what they were feeling and how all of that contributed to and affected their work. The creations made by these people can provoke a wondering of the motivation as well. Philosophers and the questions they ask, make you think deeply about an answer that may or may not be there. Scientists look at something they don’t understand and try to understand it further, making new discoveries in the process. Artists paint, draw, sculpt, etc. what they are feeling and push the mind to view the world as the artist. When you see something so complexly built, whether it be a piece of art, a research paper, or a philosophical thought, you wonder, How long did this take? Can I do something like this, how long will it take me? There are some works that are designed to make you wonder. For example, there are certain philosophical questions designed to make you wonder, about you, your life, and everything. A couple of these questions are, What is the meaning of life? Who am I? What is time? What happens after death? And Does God exist? Are just a few questions posed to make us wonder. Abstract art is made for you to interpret. It gives you a chance to “choose” what you see in the piece. There is usually something given by the artist to “guide” your wondering, or push you in the right direction, helping to give you an idea of what the artist wanted you to see. Science in general is something to be wondered about. There are constantly new things being discovered leaving you to wonder how they discovered it, there are things being proven false, where you could wonder how they figured out that it was false. Everything that happens in science, circles around curiosity and wonder. Matter of fact, not just in science, nothing would get done if no one was curious or no one wondered what would happen. If no one wondered, we would not have a lot of the things we have today. ChemistryHow does epoxy work
-What is a polymer? -How does the polymerization process work? -Can you describe the connection to the polymerization of pva that we did in class? -How can this help with our project? In order to work correctly, you need to use a 50/50 ratio of resin to hardener. On a chemical level, what is happening is the hardener, or catalyst in this case, is altering the chemical chain of the resin, letting a chemical reaction ensue, setting the resin. In order to visually see and know what was happening, we took PVA (elmer’s glue) and added boric acid. Mixing the boric acid into the glue made the glue sort of curdle, or at least that is what it looked like. Once it was “curdled” if you worked with it enough(stirred), it would turn into a putty/slime. In this case, the boric acid acted as the catalyst, altering the chemical chain in the glue, making the chemical reaction start. The glue experiment that we did was similar and relevant to the resin work that we are doing because it showed us how the hardener and resin were reacting when they are mixed together. The chemical chain in this is made up of a monomer that connects repeatedly to create a chain. The monomer has 2 carbon atoms, with hydrogen surrounding them on all sides except for one, in the one open position(the vinyl position), there is an acetate atom. This monomer is called polyvinyl acetate, or school glue(PVA). The monomers all connect, through a process called the polymerization process, creating a chemical chain called a polymer. During this process, all of the monomers connect together creating macromolecules in all different shapes and sizes. What can we learn from light? What information is in light? From light, we can learn what elements are the make up of different things, we can tell the make up of planets lightyears away by what color/type of light that it gives off. We can tell this by what “shadows” different elements give off in the spectrum as well. Light lets us see. When we see color, what is happening is the object that has color is absorbing the opposite color of light and reflecting the color that we see. This week was quite interesting and slightly stressful. Monday we had the day off. Tuesday we immediately got back and had work time for the whole day. Wednesday we started a writing piece and learned how to do the resin coatings. Thursday we coated and printed quite a few pictures. Friday we started coating some pictures, but we messed up, we learned what not to do and how to avoid the mistakes that were made. HumanitiesWhat role does each step play? In the process of taking, printing, and coating the photos, each step is equally important. And every outcome depends on the previous step and how well it was executed. The first step was to make sure that your camera had the right settings, we needed to do this in order to get a high quality image that would meet the standards needed to print on the metallic photo paper. The second step was to physically take the photo, you had to have the conditions right. The right lighting, the right time of day, and the position you are in/the objects are in. Next was processing. We processed the pictures in lightroom, the most important thing that we did in the processing step was de-noising the picture, if it was slightly blurry or had any “hot pixels”, with the paper we were printing on, it would be very noticeable, we also had to amp up the brightness and bring down the contrast to get the picture to print the way we wanted it to. After processing was printing. Printing was probably the easiest part, all we had to do was load paper, press a button, and make sure we liked the way the picture came out. Next was mounting. Mounting was extremely, not difficult per say but hard to get it 100% perfect. We sprayed a piece of wood with spray adhesive and carefully laid the picture down as straight as we could. From there we used a roller to make sure that it was good and stuck and flat on the wood. After we were finished mounting the pictures, we started to mix the resin. In order to get the resin how we needed it to be, we had to combine exactly a 50/50 ratio of hardener to resin and then stir slowly, making sure not to mix any air bubbles into it, for 10+ minutes. Once the resin was completely mixed, we poured it onto the mounted picture, carefully spreading it around the photo evenly. After the photo was completely coated we had to take a blowtorch to it to pop the air bubbles. We had to move the blowtorch relatively fast across the photo to avoid burning it, but we had to torch it for at least five minutes to make sure that all of the air bubbles popped. Once we finished torching it, we covered the picture up so it wouldn’t get ruined and to minimize the amount of dust that could get on it. Roughly 30 minutes after we covered the picture we took it back out and torched it one last time and got rid of any lingering dust before covering it again. ChemistryWhat is the relationship with light?
-How does each step of the process change/involve light? -Why is it important to frame and exhibit work? Each step of the process involves light in a very different way, light also reacts differently to your picture depending which step of the process you are on. When you are taking your picture, it is important to take into consideration the time of day, so you can take it during your ideal hours of light. Sunset and sunrise. These times provide the best light because the sun is low in the sky, emitting a soft, diffused light that produces better pictures than the harsher sunlight. When taking the photo you also need to take into consideration that when you process and print your photo, that part of the process depends heavily on what the lighting is in the photo and what the light is focused on. When processing you need to take the brightness up or down and make adjustments to get the light to translate how you want it when you print. Once you print the photo, you need to mount it and then cover it in resin. Light reacts to resin in a unique way. It adds depth to your photo. It does this because the light goes through the resin and bounces off the picture back out of the resin, but every time it does that some of the light bounces back off the surface of the resin back onto the picture, creating a loop of light. Light is also plays another role in the resin process. When we look into the glare of the photo we are able to see dust and anything else that made its way into our photos and are able to remove them. We also use the glare when we are blow torching the picture to make sure that we pop all of the air bubbles. There is a certain pride that only comes when you exhibit your work for other people to see. Framing a piece of art that you made, making it look better, gives you a feeling of accomplishment. When you put your work out into the open for people to look at and critique, it can help make you and your work better. On Monday we worked in our project groups and worked on our independent experiment. On Tuesday we set up a telescope and set off our sparklers. Wednesday we worked in our project groups. Thursday we discussed matter and played with dry ice. On Friday we cleaned, revised our Steinbeck inspired writing, and wrote about someone else's photo. For this project my role is a Space Cadet. This week was very successful for us. We learned how to set up a telescope and actually did it. Our task was to read a note across campus with the telescope, the note read, "Andrew Eats Cheese." HumanitiesChemistryThis week I continued my independent experiment. We coated the sparklers thicker and tested one of the thicker coated ones the same day, but it was still too wet, so it just released a bunch of smoke, rather than giving the result we wanted. So we waited until the next day to test them, and they worked! The sparklers released more fire than I would have liked but they were really cool. My group throughout this whole experiment worked really well together.
Link to Video1 Link to Video2 Monday we went out and took pictures and processed them in photoshop. Tuesday we watched a documentary on the Pacific Crest Trail and did a different colored fire experiment and my group started our independent experiment. On Wednesday we went to a local photography gallery. On Thursday we wrote in Steinbeck's style and continued our independent experiment. On Friday we tested one of our sparklers and made project job groups and made a plan with them. Unprocessed picture of San Diego Bay Processed picture of San Diego Bay HumanitiesSteinbeck Inspired Writing: There is a valley between green snowless mountains, where lizards bask on sunny rocks, and birds fly down the mountains and through the mile long orange orchards, flying faster and higher to avoid the gaze of a nearby dog, running through the orchards into a ranch. He spooks a horse, the dog keeps running, passing through trees and bushes, coming to a pause at a street. A car races by. He barks and starts chasing it from the side of the road. He tires and heads home, where he is greeted with open arms from his family. Project Specialty - Space Cadet Link to Project Specialty Progress Sheet ChemistryWe tested one of our sparklers and it was very anti-climactic. We didn't coat them enough so it didn't exactly spark, it was just burning. When we lit the burn test, it sparked really well, but the actual sparkler fizzled out. The reason, that I think they didn't work was because we didn't coat the sticks enough. In order to get the results we want we will have to go back and re-coat the ones we have already coated so that they have a thick enough coating so they have the desired amount of spark. Other than the results we got, nothing went wrong during the experiment. My whole group worked really well together and cooperated. Monday we planned field trips for our landscapes and developed photos. Tuesday we worked on our independent experiment proposal and developed photos. Wednesday I wasn't at school. On Thursday we worked on a writing piece describing a landscape panorama and talked about how to take landscape photos. Friday we developed photos, looked at photos of San Diego, and finishedour writing piece on the panorama. HumanitiesChemistryMy independent experiment is making sparklers. We will make the mix, coat the sticks, dry, and test them. I am hoping to learn more about chemical reactions and why sparklers work.
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June 2017
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