Multimedia Critique

I chose to go to VII’s web site and critique one of their projects. I chose a project entitled Paparazzi because I thought it might be interesting. I thought it wasn’t interesting at all and boring. I don’t like how they opened the project with two men talking. You can’t see but the torso of the guy in the green shirt and that is very distracting. If they would have moved the camera a little bit down or something it would have been better cause you would be able to see the guy’s face. I just don’t know that it really fits in with the project terribly well. Focusing on the guy’s green shirt instead of on the face of the guy in the car is really bothersome also.

Some of the people in the project don’t talk English at times. Those parts just disinterest me because you don’t have subtitles or anything to tell what he is talking about. If you are going to include someone talking in another language you need to have a voiceover or subtitles to help the viewer understand more. When you get to the part where they are in a noisy place talking about Jack Nicholson it is hard to hear the voices of the people over the sound of wherever they are.

I feel like as they go from scene to scene it gets choppy. There are no smooth transitions from one part to another. The project starts using a subtitle in the middle, which I didn’t understand because you could understand the person talking. There really was no need for the wording at the bottom.

Overall I don’t really understand the concept of this multimedia. Yes it is about paparazzi but I feel a much better job could have been done. The video wasn’t of that great of quality either. I felt like they could have focused more on the rush of getting to photograph a celebrity or shown more of the paparazzi following people to get the point across. At times, I feel like this same project could be told in stills and audio.

The user does have control of the project by play and pause buttons at the bottom of the screen. I’m not sure how this fits in with VII’s website. It does talk about Mexican paparazzi but I don’t see how that fits into the site. The site seems to have more moving pieces or more important issues and I feel like the issue of paparazzi isn’t as important as other multimedia they have on the site. In the above paragraphs I talked about what I would change and what I didn’t like about the project.

Painting with light

104,625 patients have been wait-listed for organ donation as of October 29, 2009. Everyday, 17 people die from waiting for an organ donation. The four most needed organs are the kidney, liver, heart and lungs.

Single Flash

Officer Brian Frey trains with Enzo on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at MUPD located in Virginia Avenue parking garage. Each day Officer Frey works with Enzo on bomb tasks. Officer Frey will put Enzo's leash on the door handle while he goes in the other room and hides the bomb material for Enzo to find.

Single flash was difficult. I'm not really happy with my select but felt my other photos had shadows and hotspots so I chose this photo because it seems to have a relatively even distribution of light and not really any hotspots. It isn't the best composition by any means. I shot this at iso 100, bounced flash off the white ceiling, shutter speed of 1/125 and f5.6.

Multimedia Critique

Here is the link to the video.
http://video.on.nytimes.com/
You have to scroll down to "Turning Rockets into Roses."

The video I chose to look at is called “Turning Rockets into Roses.” It is on the NY Times Web site. I chose this video because the title of it stood out to me and made me want to know what exactly turning rockets into roses was all about.
I think this story is very appropriate for multimedia. I think that if this story were a written story you wouldn’t have the same effect. This story needs to be told with visuals and audio so people can understand it better and see exactly how this man does what he does and why.
I did have control of the project when it was playing. I could play and pause it and also make it full screen if I chose to do so. I could also control the volume. A progress bar was at the bottom to show how far through the project I was. The navigation and design were clear for me to follow and the design was simple which I liked.
The overall color scheme of the project is simple. When you view it on the page you have a medium grey background. The one thing I wish they did is when you click on the video that it would go to its own separate page to view. If you just want to view it on the screen you have all this writing around it that makes it distracting. You would have to put it in full screen mode if you didn’t want to have all that extra.
The audio for the most part is clear to understand. Since this man is from the Middle East he is a little hard to understand at times. The images are clear on the smaller screen but on the full screen they are a bit blurry but that is expected most of the time when you go to full screen to view a video.
I wish they had focused on the positive part of this man making roses out of rockets. They included one woman who didn’t agree with what he was doing and it was out of place to me. She was the only one they interviewed who objected to what he was doing. I just think it detracts from the focus of the original concept of the story.

Metal Assignment

Mr. Metal kneels down while holding his head in his hands. He couldn’t figure out how to get his head to stay on his head so instead he just decided to hold it. A red butterfly came along to comfort him in this day of sadness.

Nick Brandt Photography Critique

Colleen Lefholz

Photographer Web site Critique

The photographer’s Web site I chose to look at was Nick Brandt. He is a nature photographer and that is something I am interested in so I thought I would evaluate his site and maybe get some ideas for my own.

I like when you first go to his page it is very simple. There isn’t a lot going on to confuse the person looking at the site. I first clicked on portfolios and visited that section. I did like how he had his photos at the bottom and you could click on to view each one. I like having the photos at the bottom, I think that is something different but I wish you could just scroll through them with your next and back keys on your keyboard instead of clicking on each individual one to see it. That just would make it more user friendly for me. The site does have buttons to go back to the home page, which is a good thing so people don’t have to constantly click the back button.

He has all the tabs that people would want. He has a portfolio section, books he’s written, contact information, reviews and links. I really think the white background works with his photos also. If he had a dark background, his pictures would get lost I think. His pages are clear to understand and all have navigation, which is key in a Web site.

Lighting Diagrams

Single light source.

Multiple light source

These are the lighting diagrams for my classmate studio portraits.

Classmate Studio Portrait

Eve Edelheit has a vibrant personality and loves to smile. Edelheit is wearing a yellow scarf and bengal bracelets that she bought while on a trip to India.

Eve Edelheit loves to travel. She has been several places around the world including her favorite place, India. Edelheit has been to India three times, most recently visiting this past summer. Edelheit has learned more about herself and about her photography while in India. Eve is in her silk blazer that she had custom made in India on her last visit there.

My partner for the studio portrait was Eve Edelheit. Here are my two photos that I chose to turn in. Lighting diagrams to soon follow.

Below is my self-critique of both the video and portraits.

Classmate Studio Portrait and Video Critique

The classmate studio portrait assignment was one that was fun to do but very challenging. Eve and I both had to do a lot of thinking when things weren’t working correctly. One of the main problems I had was with my camera. I had the sync cord in the proper place on my camera and on the speedotron but it wouldn’t fire for some reason. I tried Eve’s sync cord and it wouldn’t work either. That first day of shooting was mainly Eve since I had to take my camera to the camera store to figure out what was wrong. Turns out I can only use the smaller speedotron because the other one has too many volts for my camera.

Figuring out how I wanted to light Eve wasn’t difficult for me. I experimented by placing lights where I wanted them to be and took a picture to see how it was. I metered before I took the photos and most of my photos were taken at f13 with a shutter speed of 1/125 and an ISO of 100. Sometimes the light was too bright on her face and I had to move the light back a little or have Eve move back further so the light wouldn’t blow out her face.

I found that using the gray background never really worked well for me. The pictures really washed out her face and showed no shadows at all. Eve and I did a lot of thinking and trying to figure out settings on our camera that might change that but in the end I just switched to the black background because I liked that one best. I tried pictures on all three but black was the best for me.

If I did this assignment again, I would want to explore more with the gels. I tried two pictures with that but wasn’t getting it right away and didn’t want to use my photos up on trying to figure it out. I didn’t really get the two lights like I would have liked. I feel one light really worked well for me but when I added another light, the photos just weren’t turning out like I wanted so that is something I want to go back and figure out. I want to be able to use two lights well and I think if I could have taken more photos I would have been able to figure it out.

The video assignment was easier than I thought it would be. Eve and I set up two lights diagonal from each other with the black chair in between them. It was a good set up that had good shadows on her face. Since we didn’t have the wireless mics, we had to use the shotgun mic on top of the video camera. For some reason it produced this buzzing in one of the ear buds. It was really annoying but we didn’t know what was causing it. I had to do a few takes on this because her first take was over a minute so she had to cut it down by a lot. If I were to do this assignment again, I would definitely use the wireless mic because I think that would cut down on the buzzing.

I also included my meter testing takes that Rita told me to redo and submit again.