Digital Processes Project No. 3 - Photo Album & Book

      For this third project, where we shot 100 so photographs of items representing everyday American life and chose 20 to edit and present, I focused primarily on bringing life to what would ordinarily be considered mundane and also add color to rather drab scenes. I used a Nikon D80 Camera to take these photographs and edited the selected photographs through Photoshop, mainly altering the amount of exposure, saturation, and focus in certain areas. While I certainly believe that the media-sharing social network Flickr is an effective way of sharing one’s visual art to wider audiences and preserving your files on the internet, I also think it can add the risk of over-exposure and limit the amount the success one finds with their work because complete strangers can look at it and replicate the same effect.
      In other words, over-exposure through social media outlets such as this can depreciate the value of the artwork because it can shared throughout the web multiple times and be altered in so many ways that depreciates its uniqueness. Then again, one can always be caution about what he or she puts on the web to be sure that whatever value can be placed on his or her work does not fall at more rapid rate. One could also equate this depreciation to most of the subjects of my photographs displayed, majority of them affected and weathered over time by over-exposure of the physical type. As Martin McLuhan briefly states in Medium Is the Massage, "Our official culture is striving to force the new to do the work of the old" (McLuhan 94). These digital photographs could be alleviating the subjects in some ways, but are really documenting them as the way they are, while highlighting some of their more prominent features that either come their age or distract from it. Perhaps these photographs are helping in some to keep their subjects under a more relevant lens.
      For my Blurb photo book, I tried to achieve a humorous design rather than a visual one to help make the content of the book more engaging. Whether that will be case is unknown because humor can only go so many ways for certain people. The black background helps keep the book layout simple, accessible for people to read, and easier to concentrate on the photographs centered on each respective page. The marker felt font provides the book it humorous appeal with it bold and childish design and hopefully further lends to its overall sarcasm. I add exaggerated and cartoonish representation of myself in the "About the Author" section and the back of the book to again add to the non-seriousness of the book as a whole. As an end result, the design of book, as well as the title, begs the question whether or not this is a photo book or just a gag.

Link to My Flickr Photo Album:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/129199553@N07/sets/72157650604692251/