Pumpkin Show, iMac guts, and more fashion drama

AMotD (Awesome Moment of the Day)	Re-assembling a lab iMac and it didn’t go “bloop!” and let off a small cloud of smoke.
Current main project:	One Minute of Video and FASHION: glamour

Had a mild panic attack during class Wednesday as yet another assignment was handed out and I realized I’m fairly well screwed for time. The next 3 weeks are going to be interesting. Fortunately nobody noticed the micro breakdown, including Jonathan sitting next to me, so I must have (re-)covered well.

The week started off great – good grades on a Publication Design project (The Resume) and a typography quiz, and very pleasant grades on my Audio Slideshow project (see an earlier post on Gary, the dulcimer maker) and a few smaller A/V class assignments. I want to incorporate feedback and make both projects better, but it was good to do well the first time around. Then there was the Fashion assignment… some of the worst grades I’ve gotten since that honors computer science class sophomore year of undergrad. This put a damper on my week. (Here are the photos in question.)

Tuesday night I was in the lab until 3:30 trying to print out my Publication Design and Fashion assignments. Wednesday night my roommate Bryan and I drove to Circleville for the Pumpkin Show, and back, and I miraculously didn’t fall asleep, which was good since I was driving.

While I was there I picked up a copy of the Advertiser’s special Pumpkin Show edition. A few weeks ago one of their editors called me and wanted to use one of my photos as the cover for the 23,000 copy issue. I was flattered, of course, although I would have been more flattered if they had paid me for it. Anyhow, she did do a very nice job of writing up my bio on the inside, with contact info and all, so that was very cool.

I cringed when saw the cover image, though. The print quality was not great, quite aside from the interesting cropping they had done. I wondered if they had applied some Photoshop filter (like “watercolor”) since I had sent a high-res file for their use. It should have printed much better than that. When I got home I checked my email to her, and I’ll be damned but if I didn’t send a tiny 85KB file! Yahoo Mail has recently “improved” their interface, and while in general it is pretty cool, this one feature screwed me: it now automatically re-sized image attachments to be smaller. So while I attached a 5MB large image, it resized it to something that might have printed nicely on the head of a pin.

So that was my mistake, and fairly unprofessional, but why didn’t they say anything?! I would think a publisher would know that wasn’t an acceptable image to print, and would have asked – especially after I said “I have attached a large high-res copy suitable for printing” in the accompanying email. So that was another downer.

The Fashion assignment for this week was “The Storyline” – our photos had to tell a story of some kind, not just be a literal “this is a purse” photo. Here’s what I came up with: “the model is a photographer who has just gotten negative feedback from an unsatisfied client (an Art Director at a Fashion magazine). Her photos are in the garbage and she is looking through a magazine for new ideas. A Helmut Newton photo hangs in her office.” I wonder if my story is too subtle?

The Helmut Newton photo I chose was one that my professor showed me as an example of a conceptual “storyline” fashion photo. The model is wearing (only) high-heeled shoes and this counts as “fashion”, so I’m a little confused how my model in the previous assignment, wearing an expensive designer shirt, brand-name jeans and sneakers, and a large bright orange watch, is not identifiable as fashion.

In one of Helmut Newton’s photos he put his own photos in the garbage – I think my prof said they were polaroids from the shoot itself – so I put all of my photos from previous shoots – all the bad grades I’ve been getting – in the garbage can in my image. Bottom line: even if you don’t know my story, there is obviously something going on in the photo. And really, how often do you actually understand trendy fashion photos anyhow?! I have a model wearing large bold patent leather shiny boots, and if there isn’t fashion visible I have Helmut’s photo hanging in the background to back me up. If high heels count… of course my model isn’t naked, so maybe I didn’t accomplish what Helmut did.

Two notes about those photos: Thanks to classmate Midori for being my last-minute model. My roommate/classmate Jonathan volunteered to go down to the studio and be my assistant. He was amazing with the lighting, and really helped me to learn a few key concepts about studio lighting in general.

Oh, and I thought I made a hilarious joke in the audio/video class Thursday. We were learning about filters in our audio editing software, and one of them was “Echo”. Apply it to your audio track and it makes it echo. Simple as that. So I asked what would happen if you dropped the filter onto the sound of a duck quacking? Nobody laughed. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Really? Mythbusters even busted the urban legend that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo. There are Snopes articles and about.com entries and all sorts of stuff. Whatever. I enjoyed my little joke.