iPhotoing Part 3: Seasons and Time

Hey again everyone!

So I just wanted to share some more edits that are a little more extreme!

To show how you can completely change the season and time period that you are representing through your edited iPhoto photo, through dramatic shifts in the "Adjust" functions and "Effects".

Here I've dramatically adjusted the exposure, contrast, saturation, highlights, shadows, temperature etc of the image to make the colours extremely vibrant. 

Now it looks like it's a hot summer's day, because to be honest it was so cold, I think I would have preferred to go in summer...Now it looks like I am rather silly wearing all those layers, doesn't it look like it's at least 30c? 

So the way this image was edited is a reflection of my direct memories of my freezing (but amazing) holiday and how the seasons have shaped the way I represented it. 

Here I was thinking about New York at the turn of the 20th century...

So I toned down the colour and vibrancy of the image with a series of functions again, and gave the impression of an old camera having taken the photo through the "Vignette" function. 

So what I have tried to show you all through this journey, is that editing isn't just for the sake of pretending to be more aesthetically polished.

iPhoto can truly give strong insights into your personal interests and how you can convey them pictorially. 

Paul 

Instagramation Part 2.5

Following on from my rant about appealing to cultural genes, just posted the following photo from Instagram on Facebook........... and with the caption "it's about to get loud."

So tell me bloggers, what does this photo say about me? That I'm musical, artistic, shows a few cables in the background so I must be "in" with the digital. But what most of you don't realise is that this will be the first time I am picking up an electric guitar. Also, despite having taught myself acoustic, I failed music in high school. And the cables in the background are mostly connected to heaters, chargers, nothing toooo fancy. So that's me in the flesh...

But Who. Am. I. Online?

xx Nicola

iPhotoing Part 2: What story are you trying to tell?

Like I said briefly at the end of my last post...I strongly believe everyone is inspired by different time periods and seasons when they are editing their photos. 

iPhoto has a series of in-built editing functions that make it easy to choose the mood, time period or season you want to use to "inspire" your photo and change the memory of the event you are representing. 

For the image above - I simply applied some "Antique" and "Fade Colour" effects and suddenly it looks like I am presenting New York in a film noir context.

Now thinking about it...this choice of editing in my photo, reflects my deep interest in the culture of New York from that 1940s/1950s time period, and how I am attempting to represent that through this photo as a homage to Hollywood films of the time. The history of this photo has been re-written to show how I would have loved to experience the region in a different context. 

So the way photos are edited isn't simply for the purposes of looking more GLAMOUROUS or POLISHED, it reflects people's deeper cultural interests.  

So if you weren't thinking it already, yes I was a little inspired by this famous scene in An Affair To Remember. =P

Found this here, good to know someone else still loves the classics.

Okay so maybe what I was thinking with this second edit using the "Adjust" tool was that I just didn't want people to know how cold and cloudy it was...

It's natural that sometimes image edits can be for vanity purposes, but normally there's a deeper cultural message behind it. 

Paul 

A constructed version of the self - I've been thinking about this in response to my post about photos creating authenticity.

Yes, photos do create a sense of authenticity, but what role does our ability to regulate the photos we're tagged in play.

As i mentioned in my last post, I went to a Hen's Party last weekend. The bride's mother had a camera and was 'recording' the event, she snapped photos of us at the sophisticated high tea in the afternoon, in front of the Stretch Hummer, having drinks on our way to the city inside the Hummer, while waiting outside the dance studio for our lesson, during the lesson, at the bar after the lesson etc. You get the idea, throughout the night, photos were taken. 

But fast-forward to Monday morning when i was on my way to uni and the notification came up "Kirsty Smith added 22 photos of you." Suddenly i was anxious. What were the photos of? Were they of me respectably sipping champagne at the high tea or slightly tipsy with a leg looped around a pole at the pole dancing class? I was on edge as my train entered a tunnel and i was unable to view the photographs now contributing to my online identity. I wasn't ashamed of my involvement in the pole dancing class, but i still didn't want all my Facebook friends thinking that was an accurate representation of me. 

My day progressed, back-to-back classes and meetings and before i knew it i was at home and had been unable to regulate my online profile. As i sat down on Facebook in the early hours of the morning to see which photos had been taken, a notification came up.

A church friend had seen the photos and commented. I immediately took down the photo which presented me playfully lifting the tip of my dress up. Then the same friend posted on my wall. 

I had regulated my photos, i had removed a tag from the photo to disallow my Facebook friends to see the photo. I had effectively, altered a version of my self. In reality i was enjoying myself, having a laugh with friends at a pole dancing studio, but online i had removed the record of that. 

My Facebook photos are a representation of who i am. I removed the tag of a photo that i thought lowered my sense of self. I was constructing my identity. 

I wonder how often people do this, i wonder how often i do this without realising. Removing photos of me looking awkward, removing photos of me in social situations that others could perceive me as something other than where i want to be seen. Where once we didn't remove a photo from the developers envelope and frame it, now we remove any record of it, or just any ability for people we care about seeing it. 

A tumblr rampage

Yesterday, I went on a tumblr rampage. 

Sick of my current blog, I decided to create an entirely new one, to create a new online persona for myself. I picked a title, chose a profile picture, selected a theme, and began a half-hour of frantic tag-searching, cool-blog-finding, uploading and reblogging of pictures and graphics that I liked. This was the result (actually, this is just the first page. As I said, I went on a rampage. You can view the whole blog here):

What can people tell about me from this tumblr, I wondered? I came up with the following things:

• I like the song 'Good Feeling' by Flo Rida, and enjoy making witty titles and URLs of blogs from song lyrics. 
• I think that posing in front of a web cam pulling my hair back and tilting my head makes for a super hot profile pic. 
• I like cute animals (note the chimpanzee & tiger, and kitten & converse pics).
• Colourful jewellery is my style, as are homemade rainbow iceblocks.
• I've been outdoor iceskating (check out my Facebook album 'New York Winter 2012 YAY' - hope this isn't hypocritical considering the other post I made here), and at some point I've been lying on a hammock in Costa Rica.
• I like pretty photos of trees in autumn. 
• I like taking indie polaroid photos of sunsets, parties, and fun times with friends, or siblings, or kids in Costa Rica. 
• My hair is to thin to hold curls (#devastated).
• Lord of the Rings is one of my favourite film series.  

Are these things an accurate reflection of who I am? Or are they a selective construction of who I want to be? (Cue: suspenseful music and dramatic look).

Feature Ideas

So if Ash's post didn't make it clear, we've decided our overall topic will be exploring the idea of the visual web. This is a massive topic however, so we need to narrow it down into a feature question. So this is a post for us all to post some ideas for questions, and hopefully within a week we'll come up with an idea with a bit more direction! 

Ideas: 

• How is the rise of the visual web giving a voice to the disadvantaged and marginalised? 
• What are the privacy implications of a visual web? 
• Is the visual web a result of a generation with decreasing attention spans? 
• How does the visual web enable the creation of a legitimate online persona? 
• How is image sharing shaping our online identities and overall sense of self?