one more color book

the latest in a saga of photography trial and error, another color book!

i am excited about these, i think they turned out really well, and they were fun to stage, even if they resulted in some hand cramps from all the xacto cutting. pictured: construction paper & cutting mat. each of these phrases is contained in a little origami envelope that i can't bring myself to throw away yet, even the "confetti." kelly helped me pull my layout into something much more dynamic and balanced.

keep reading!

the last blog's cliffhanger picks up here: after that first critique, i just set out to take lots of different staged idea photos. these include a few locations in my house including the stairs and an enthused & cooperative roommate's bedroom. (her room is much more fun than mine.) eventually i wound up again in the photo studio (now i am teased when i asked for the keys, i've been in and out so much) staging hand shadow puppets.

that! now. by that point i'd hit upon something that had some legitimate potential. marty did some neat folding and proposed i try to combine the pillows/bed idea and the wall/shadows idea, and incorporate the lamps on the wall (because nobody sleeps with taplights, not even children) and so then came another thousand or so photographs on that theme, resulting in the following, that i offered today.

the sad story about those are how grainy and unfortunate they are. actually, the sad story is me & photography... we've had our troubles this semester in every class. but i am buying my own camera this christmas and i am going to tame it and we are going to get along great.

so with a gentler photoshopping, i dove back in with some zooming and cropping and lightening and brightening and leveling et cetera.

which brings us to the present.

(ta-da!) here is what i'm finally working with. it all comes down to a few days worth of tweaks, and then my semester of type 1 will be at a close. so strange. anyway, color correction and general cleaning-up: onward!

the story thus far

when you last saw my reach-out-and-read project, it was in its infancy, barely beginning on its path toward identity.

in the time since then i have taken no fewer than 2000 photographs. maybe 3000. so many photographs. consequently, so many iterations. consequentlyconsequently, this will be an image heavy blog post to catch us up on all the stages that eventually led me to my final image, whose color i will be correcting manically until shortly before it is due.

firstly i built my real book-object, from a grimm book called "the fisherman's wife," chosen for its appearance in the public domain. the construction paper letters changed from "read out loud!" to a simpler "read to me," the text from the all-type poster that i didn't end up pursuing.

i opted for "read to me" as opposed to "read to your child" because it engages the viewer more directly and doesn't necessarily imply parenthood. the responsibility of reading to children need not fall only in the hands of parents, because anyone who themselves can read is capable of reading out loud to someone younger.

my original intention was to have hands holding the book, and i tried a variety of people to get some diversity. here are 3 willing or unwilling hand models.

i tried a few other totally different things, too.

it was determined that, despite its unfortunate coloring (i thought it vintage and indie; it came through as a terrible photograph... and as you & urban outfitters can tell, the two are not mutually exclusive) the last was the closest to the right idea, based on the presence of the shadows on the "wall" and the fun bedtime idea that warm lights and shadows might offer. i relinquished the "somebody holding it" idea, picked up some happy bedtime-story taplights, and went to staging.

i'm going to cut this blog post in two so that it does not become quite so unwieldy all in one go. next up: the next set of iterations up through today's process!