Before I left Indiana for San Francisco, I traveled up to Indianapolis to photograph and say goodbye to my really great friend Brittany. While it was a bitter sweet night, I’m so glad to have gotten her in front of my camera. Brittany is a kick ass designer, a super passionate person, and she is beautiful as well. Lucky her, and lucky me for getting to photograph her.

Some of the above photographs represent some of my best work to date (I think). I would love to hear what you think. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

In this iteration, I’ve added some toggle buttons that allow for viewing the title, description, category, and exif information for a given photograph. This information appears as an overlay on the image directly, and is always ‘at-hand’ during a critique.

5th Design Iteration

Explanations

I’m looking for feedback from photographers and designers. For background information on this design, please see http://www.johnwaynehill.com/blog/category/capstone/, the first post has some good information.

Recently, I had the joy of photographing my good friend Brittany. We were hanging out in Indianapolis talking design and life while enjoying some wine in a local bar. The light was brilliant so I grabbed my camera and made some photographs. Brittany isn’t a trained model and was a little shy in front of the camera, but I was able to get some great emotions out of her with a little directing and a watchful eye (and I’m sure the wine helped a little). Here are what I think are the best shots from that session.

Brittany is a kick ass designer, see her work, and a good model (who has never got the modeling ball rolling) as well. We had a blast creating some fantastic photographs. If you have any thoughts about the above photographs, leave a comment below.

My capstone project is dealing with photography critique online. Recently in our Mad Skillz Club we covered mind maps. So, I decided to mind map my capstone topic under the general umbrella of photography.

This is merely a tool to help me to better understand the general space in which I’ll be working these next two semesters.

image courtesy of Qiao-Da-Ye

For my final capstone (thesis) project of my master’s program, I’ll be working on the topic of photography critique in a digitally mediated environment. Below is my initial plan for the project. I have a great passion for photography and critique in general and I don’t believe there is a good solution for providing critiques of photography online.

Background Opportunity

Critique is essential in almost any craft or art. Photography is no different. I want to provide a system so that photography students can have their worked critiqued by other photographers.

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Location: San Francisco, CA (Polk Street)

Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens

Creative Process: Taken during an SF Bar Crawl of Polk Street. Once we took these shots and laid the glasses down, I suddenly saw this image. It was very dark, so I pumped up the ISO and got a nice grainny type look.

Post Production: I cropped this photos just a bit to remove a stray hand in the background. Nothing more.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens

Creative Process: Taken during the San Francisco Worldwide Photo Walk. I just saw and photographed.

Post Production: I cropped this photos just a bit, and played around with the color saturation to increase the yellows and oranges just a tiny bit.

Below are some recent photographs of my good friend Katie O’Donnell. Katie is a fellow masters student with me at Indiana University and does awesome work. She is interning for the summer at Oracle in the San Francisco Bay Area. Katie just picked up some new glasses so we headed out to a local park and took some photographs. Below are some of my favorites.

Location: A Mountain View, CA park

Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens

Creative Process: We went out into the park around 6:15pm and looked for good light in some shade.

Post Production: Nothing much more than normal portrait stuff.

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Last week AIGA in partnership with IxDA and other organizations held Design Week. The week held many events but what I found most interesting were the Open Studios. These are times in which different studios across San Francisco opened their doors to the public. Most of these studios had food and drink for patrons and gave tours talking about their own studio. While touring around these studios I took a bunch of photographs in order to really see how these studios operate, better reflect on design practices, as well as take some new ideas with me to the new IU HCID studio which is currently under construction. I hope you enjoy these photographs as much as I enjoyed touring these studios. I would like to thank the following studios for hosting myself and many others during design week: IDEO, Adaptive Path (where my awesome friend Dane Petersen works), Fuse Project, Hot Studio, New Deal Design, Ammunition LLC, Lunar Design, Frog Design, Smart Design, and Astro Studios.

Below are some of my favorite photographs. You can find the entire set at: http://picasaweb.google.com/johnwaynehill/DesignWeek2010.

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Location: A San Francisco bar

Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens

Creative Process: My beautiful friend Kat and I were exploring some SF bars. We sat near the front at this bar area that had fantastic light coming in through a window. I simply picked up my camera and starting shooting.

Post Production: Very little post production on this photograph. I converted the photograph to black and white and did a little skin re-touching. That’s all folks. Simple as could be.