Photobook Sequence: Buggin' Out (Digital copy)

Buggin' Out: Reflection

Buggin' Out is the sequence photobook that erupted from concepts of posing the body and experimenting with how the camera can capture motion. In this photobook, a primary goal of mine was to capture likeness and understand what made Eadward Muybridge's motion photography so profound. Another goal was to personalize this book to put a part of my spirit into the work--making this project a whole hell of a lot of fun to create.

Although not obvious at first, the sequence aspect of this work is the duration of exposure and how it gets progressively lengthier after every photograph, creating disorienting visuals and neat effects.

This is the cover page of the entire book. The process behind the image stemmed from using an LED projector that was dispersed throughout the room. Additionally, the projector has mechanics letting the light show rotate around the room.
To break from the sequence inside the book, this photograph was taken with a longer exposure (I do not remember how long), blurring my hands and body until inconceivable. The rotating LED projector was also affected by the long exposure, stretching out the light beams or liquifying the tinier green dots.
To capture the blinding face, I used a flashlight and a longer exposure time to my advantage. Because more light was reflected into the camera by the flashlight, no form could be articulated in the final photo.
The front and back cover photos were the last images I had shot and edited, and I used all of the skills I had learned from the previous photographs, using layering techniques and adjustment layers to finalize a dramatic and metal cover, intended to catch the eye of a viewer.

This photo marks the first page of the photobook, and every time I open the book, something about it makes it so satisfying to look at. It may be the composition of the pose, which was to capture a natural stance, or the nice silhouette the pose was giving. Unintentionally, and only after I took the photo, did I notice the line in the sky, which made me so happy to see, you all have no idea.
This photo was my first page because it implied the notion of no movement or the lack of movement as I stand still. It is also shot with the quickest shutter speed.

This is the second half of the first image you see alongside the first image. I needed a nice transition into the next pages, and my solution was to use the beginnings of movement in the book. It is the literal notion of movement, walking towards the next page. Like the first image, the shutter speed was very quick and captured photos very precisely.
To hammer in the idea of movement, inspired by comic book panels, I used three frames of me walking to showcase a sequence of motion.

These four images, grouped into one page, were loosely inspired by the aesthetic called "Frutiger Metro". I wanted a pop of colour in my book, using the LED projector to cast the silhouette of my body onto a blank wall. The articulation of shapes is clean due to a relatively short exposure time, slightly longer than the first images, but enough to let the colours bleed into the background. However, something I could have experimented with differently is that I think a longer exposure time with the moving LED lights would have produced a more interesting result.

This image was directly inspired by Muybridge's "Horse in Motion" study, using an updated version of his technique simply by enabling the multi-shot feature and taking shots of myself moving around a parking garage, propped up by a tripod. If you haven't started seeing it yet, this is the photo where motion blur becomes a large component of my book. I had many photos that I had to align with one another to create a cohesive and clean product. By using blending layers, the images dissolved into each other perfectly. This is by far my favourite image in the book.

This image is not actually of me, but of my younger brother. I wanted to thank him for helping me with the first two photos by adding him to my book! Like the previous image, it is another running picture. What I wanted to attempt was to create a sequence of blurred frames of running, with a much crisper running image overlaying them all. This is the first image I had edited for the book, so the editing is unclean and a little everywhere; however, I think it adds to the image a little, giving it a little bit of rambunctiousness into the photo :).

For these photos, I was researching panning shots and how to capture a still image with a blurred background. The technique involved having to increase the exposure time to about 2 seconds and take a shot of a moving subject, my subject being obviously vehicles. I had to follow the vehicle before I took a shot and pressed the shoot button as I followed the vehicle. To avoid any unnecessary camera shake, I used a tripod. The result of these photos turned out pretty well, but I do think I could have done better--The vehicles could have been a lot crisper, is what I mean. Still, I think it was a good first attempt.

This photo is laid next to the previous image in my book because I shot them in the same place and night, evident in my clothes, and they both use vehicles as their subject matter. This is another mini sequence page that showcases the streetlights transitioning from green to red. I was looking through images of street photography and wanted to try it out myself. Using a long exposure time of 8 seconds, I was able to capture flowing beams of light from vehicles driving past.

This photo, alongside the previous cluster of images, is light art that I created. I've seen the light artist, Dariustwin, on Instagram, painting dinosaurs and other things with some sort of light source. After doing light art myself, I can say it is no easy task, so Dariustwin is a very skillful person with the effect! Using a shutter speed of 12 seconds, I used a flashlight, covered gently with my hand, to not overexpose the camera to draw the pictures. I decided to paint faces as they would bring some life into my book, and since one of my motifs was bodies, faces fit in well, although it does break away from the "no portraits" boundary in the assignment (haha). With simple editing, I mashed everything together for an interesting layout!

This image is the final image, meaning the exposure time was set to the max, which I think was around 16 seconds. As I worked and experimented with longer exposures, I found that capturing anything moving was difficult. The amount of time a subject moved in a frame dictated how much form would be captured. The faster and how much a subject moved and stayed in the shooting time, would show a blurry and incoherent the image would be. If the subject moved according to the shooting time, if it moved slowly, the final image would be ghoulishly transparent and wispy, seen in the larger photograph above. I was playing around with the lengthy exposure time and found that it was possible to capture two images in one shot. Posing still for a duration of time, then moving into another pose, would capture two separate bodies. I wanted to have these bodies interact with one another, so I posed them in a way that the bodies would have a relationship with one another.

This is the back cover of the sequence book, and it simply is my arm waving from one end of the frame to the other. Like the front cover, I used the LED projector to create the fleshy red tones and flashy green lights. This photo idea was heavily inspired by The Electric Prunes album cover, Release of an Oath, which I had briefly talked about in a previous blog post! Like many of the pictures in my book, I spliced and used blending layers to configure this cover.

To conclude this blog post, I wanted to say that this was the most engaged I have been for an assignment in a hot minute--it was fun and interesting to have learned so much about photography and its techniques. I hope to expand on my knowledge further in the future.

Here are some other pictures that did not make it into the book: