A large majority of my chosen images in this "Objects" page are from the same day and place. On the Saturday before all of my assignments were due in this class, my dad asked to get out of the house with me. One of the options that he gave me was to find the Jackson Motor Speedway that was built in the late 40's and was abandoned after being shut down in the early 70's. It was very difficult to get to, having to push through tree branches and thick brush, but here is the first sign that we were close: A giant pile of car tires. This photo is one of the first that I captured in the trip and is still one of my favorites. |
This photo provides a slightly better view of the amount of tires that made up the pile, although this is nowhere near the total. Walking through deep, overgrown forest to find hundreds of tires in one spot is peculiar, to say the least. Eventually choosing not to due to the weight, I initially wanted to take one of these tires with me to create some cool framing in future photos once I find the raceway, but luckily this would definitely not be the first strange pile of tires that I would come across in my journey. |
We finally found the raceway. Squeezing between an old wooden fence and barbed wire, we emerged from the woods to see what had once been a popular racing spot. 700' long at its longest and 400' long at its shortest, this raceway was now home to cracked pavement elevated by tree roots and wandering deer (yes one was there,) The first thing I saw on the ground from where we emerged was a rusty metal square with 9 evenly spaced holes through it. I have no idea what it is (although my dad said it was probably used for shooting practice,) but the colors on it were beautiful. Looking at it now, I see all sorts of blues, reds, purples, yellows, and my first thought was how much this looks like a satellite image of an exoplanet. |
Here is a closer view of the metal piece that I found, focusing in on one of the holes in it. To me, this image looks very much like a picture of some peculiar land mass on Earth, perhaps surrounded by ocean waves or lush forest. Although a very close up macro-photo, I see a large chunk of earth that erupted from the ground and left a crater in its place. |
This photo (as well as the following) displays the last object that I captured in this little exploration that I had with my dad. One thing that I found quite compelling was how much space that nature had reclaimed from this site. Although the concrete track and wooden fencing remained, the pavement now splits with miniature earthquakes, torn up by the roots of the trees that were not before able to thrive; the fencing remained as well, but was now rotten and home to insects and lush, green moss. Despite the efforts of humans to claim mother nature's home as their own, their attempts failed and nature reclaimed its home. |
Although quite similar to the previous image, I chose to include this one in addition to the last because I really liked the imbalance created by these two sides of the picture. Why is there only one on the right side while the tree was able to support an entire group of berries on the left? I suppose that's just how mother nature intended her children to grow, but if I felt all philosophical right now, I could probably think of a pretty good metaphor for equality and justice. |
I wasn't originally planning to include this in my photography portfolio-In fact, this photo wasn't even taken with photography class in mind; I took this photo as a way to establish my new instagram profile specifically for my ceramic art. This was a teapot that I made in my third trimester of the 2022-2023 school year, and I decided that this piece deserved a better quality photo than the one I took in third trimester. |
Although it is a kids game, I spent a substantial amount of my early to mid teen years and childhood playing Minecraft with my friends and siblings. When I imagine Minecraft, I don't just remember the game, but also the memories I made through it. I remember the first multiplayer "realm" that I had with my friends and all of the late nights that included more gaming than it did sleep. This filter reminds me of the pixelated style of Minecraft, and it makes me happy to imagine my own art piece in a game that holds so many good memories. |
This is the only photo that I took of an object that has a black & white filter over it. I think that due to the contrast between the bright and dark tones, especially between the two colors of the chess pieces, using black & white on this image was a very fitting choice. I really like the bokeh in this photo and how the closer aspects are not the focal point, but the farther piece is. |
Although I really like this photo, I forgot to take other angles of the object, and therefore was unable to include it in my collection for the project, so think of this as a bonus photo. One of the details that I appreciate in this piece is the empty cans in the background. Despite not being very visible in the photo, there were probably about 50 or so empty cans in a pile in the woods. My first thought when coming across it was "how hard is it to just recycle them?" I wanted to focus in on a single can while including the others in the picture, so keeping them in the background allowed me to do that in a subtler way. |