Metaphor: Fear

This assignment was to take pictures of metaphor. Unlike in past years, this year they gave the class a theme. I found it hard to portray fear (or do they want us to elicit fear??) without turning to cliches. And to portray fear in a universal sense, yet having that sense informed by my personal choices. Not sure whether I succeeded or not. I'm posting more than my usual five because I haven't yet decided which of these to turn in as my final 5. After you look at them, I'll give my comments of what I was going for. I'm sorry I downloaded these in small format...I am not sure that Pictures and Busted I & II really come through in this small format.

Bedroom Floor:


Bras:


Busted:


Pictures:


Hand:


Busted II:


Porch:


With Bedroom Floor, I was challenging myself to take a roll in the house...to find fears close to home. In my bedroom I laid on the floor and pictured the aftermath of an event (a robbery? a heart attack?) and what that would be like. The idea here was to show the disorientation of not quite having your bearings. Thus the odd focus, odd perspective thing.

In Bras, I had a few thoughts in mind. One was breast cancer, or the thought of mastectomy (and the bras therefore being irrelevant). Another thought was the empty nest...fearing that I'd no longer be needed, that I myself might be irrelevant, once my nurturing role was done.

Over the weekend, we went to the ACC tournament in Charlotte. Leaving the arena, we passed the bus station and found some happenings going on. Lucky for me the car was nearby with my camera, so I got out and tried out my future in the growing field of papparazzi. In both Busted I and Busted II, I tried to capture the feeling of vulnerability this woman must have felt, and her fear of what would happen in her run-in with the law.

In Pictures, I set up a shelf of my family photos so that none of the faces except Grayson's was actually visible, and tried to make his eye the focal point of the shot. I fear for him in the Marines (well, I fear for him anyway because he is fearLESS, but being in the Marines exacerbates my fear). There's always a pang in my heart when I view his official military portrait, knowing that if something happened to him, it would be the published picture in the newspaper. Maybe that's morbid, but it is what it is. Because this fear is more personal to myself, it might not be the best one to put in my portfolio....I don't know.

Hand is another shot taken in my bedroom. It's supposed to be ambiguous and elicit unease. Again, it could reference someone trying to escape an intruder; it could refer to falling or losing one's orientation; it might be a plea for mercy; it might reference feeling sucked into a vortex.

There's a small old house on a busy street near me. It is unoccupied, so I stopped one afternoon and took quite a few views of it. This was my favorite, and I was trying to illustrate a fear of abandonment.

Selective focus

Last week's assignment was "selective focus". It's where the aperture is set so that what you want is in focus, and what you don't want in focus, isn't. These were all shot with Ilford PanF B/W film.






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Pan Action

The idea on this assignment is to use a slow shutter speed while you pan the action of your subject. As you're moving along with the subject you snap the shot. Ideally the background is blurred and the subject is in focus. But realistically, as long as something about the subject is in focus, it's ok.