Blog Post #8

The photo I have chosen is from the Compose Design Advocate website under ‘through the eyes of children’. My photo is of a boy staring out of a window with what either looks like he is doing homework or something he may be drawing. Before I knew of the history of this photo I knew from the other pictures that it looks like the different children are from a poorer country in Africa. At the first glance of the photo which would be ethos in the rhetorical design of the photograph I look straight to the “vector of attention,” which is the boys face. A “vector of attention” is defined in the book as in all photographs the photographer directs your attentions by the way the people-or subjects- in the photograph are arranged. An obvious pathos is that the boy (Musa) looks like he is hard at thought about what he really wants to do with his day. The pathos of a photograph wants people to feel similar emotion when looking at the photograph. What kind of feeling do you get when you look at the photograph? After his face I look at his surroundings, where it looks like he is not in the cleanest room with the comfiest bed. You can tell from the elements in the room that it is not clean, has some broken pieces of wood in the room, and that the windows are dirty.

When talking about framing in the photograph the book says to look at a photographer’s choices about what to include (or not) in a photograph as they frame the photograph through a camera’s viewfinder. In the picture it looks to me like the photographer wanted to measure in on the boy and not his surroundings. From what I get in the picture the photographer really wanted to capture a moment when the boy looked like he was struggling or just did not want to be in his room. For all we know there could be many other kids in the same room doing the same thing, but with framing the photographer wants you to focus your attentions on parts of situations. When looking at the picture it feels like I am only five feet away from the boy and that I am much taller from the angle of the camera shot.

From the lighting of the picture it looks to me like there are no lights on in the room, only the sunshine of the outside world. The hue in the picture shows mostly of a dark base color but also contrasts with pinks, greens, and whites. Saturation portrays how much of a shade of hue is current in the colors. The pinks and greens are not very bright, but are still fairly saturated. If there weren’t those contrasting colors in the photo I think you wouldn’t be able to see the boy. The colors in the photo are more of depressing colors even though there are pinks and greens in it because of the overall dark color of the room.

Blog post #7

I personally find photography a wonderful and beautiful thing. A picture can say a numerous about of things about someone or something. There is nothing more special then capturing that perfect moment and looking upon it for a few decades. Photography is a way of life. It plays a big role on remembering our past and present times. Technology has made it even more personally with things like photobucket and facebook to help others view how you think of things also. They now have applications such as picnik to thoroughly personalize pictures with sweet backgrounds, add color to a picture, make it black and white, or just to crop a picture to a certain size.

A French inventor by the name of Nicephore Niépce was the first ever to construct a photograph, with earlier help from his sibling, who helped to move towards the idea of photography. He was also the first person to fix a photo so it would not deteriorate as quickly. Photography has constantly been used to capture special moments. Even with all his accomplishments only few people know of his name.

I did not know too much about photography until I read the textbook. In our textbook Compose Design Advocate, it gives a whole chapter on analyzing photography. It is a complicated process to come up with ideas about how or when to shoot a photograph. In the book it says that photographs are always rhetorical because the photographer is always making decisions about how audiences’ attentions will be directed and shaped as the audience looks at a photograph. There are three types of strategies, vectors of attention, framing, and cropping. These strategies also help you compose your own photograph. So when asking yourself how to start on a photograph, think of the three rhetorical strategies.