Recently in Maker we have been working on improving our creative communication abilities. The driving question of this assignment was “How might I use technology to create and communicate?” Last month I posted my reflection for the Carr portion of the Constructing Creative Communications assignment. This post is my reflection on the Herzog portion, which is about communicating through the creation of interesting images. We focused on learning a new skill every week and then applying that skill to a final photo.

The goal of this project was to expand our creative thinking and storytelling. We were focussing on improving our media production skills and storytelling using still images, as well as layout and design for graphics and images. Our aim was to understand that complex tasks require multiple tools and technologies. We also wanted to have deeper answers to the driving question.

When we started out, we learned about Fred Herzog. We then took some photos of a familiar object. I took photos of my shoe. We then took a walk outside and took photos that related to a theme. After that we selected a photo that we had taken that day and marked it up to make it have personality. What we learned about on this first day would be the basis of what we would learn about for the next few weeks. This is my marked up image:

On the second day we learned about angles. We first made self portraits using Photo Booth and the timer. We then learned about the basic camera angles. We walked around with a partner and took photos of each other using the basic angles. We then learned about lighting and took a silhouette photo of a partner. The goal of this day was to help us learn how to communicate more about a person than how they look with a photo. We then showed our skills for this project by recreating a portrait from the past. This is my recreation of a photo of my brother from when he was younger:

After that, we learned about creating mood. We started by learning about landscapes, panoramas, scale, contrast, and some advanced angles. We then took a walk to a nearby park to take some photos. After that we learned how to use Snapseed and Pixelmator Photo to edit photos. The goal of this day was to learn about how to engage an audience using mood. We then practiced that by making a photo based off of an emotion that we were assigned. This is the photo I took to show hopefulness:

We then learned how to make collages. We took photos of things that looked like the letters of our names and put them together to spell our names. We then created a personalized collage about us. We put both of these things in our about me pages. This was to help us use photographs to tell a story that reflects ourselves.

On the final day we focused on movement. We first took some bursts and live photos with two other people and used that to find a still image that shows movement. We then learned how to make a photo go from looking one way to the other using Keynote. Then we used Keynote’s animations to make GIFs that reflected who we are this also went into our about me pages. This skill helped us bring our photographs to life.

I think that I did a good job in this project and am very happy with everything that I have created. I was good at learning new techniques, angles, and editing software. I could work on staying away from old habits and making sure that I take the photo in a variety of ways.

This project has helped me improve my creative communication a lot. This portion has helped me tremendously with my photo taking abilities and it has provided me with some new ways to make photos that I will definitely be using in the future. To answer the driving question: technology can be used in a large variety of ways to communicate in countless more ways than just text or speech.