Photography
Artist Statment
My name is Mason James, and I am an adventurer, sports enthusiast, and a senior at Animas High School.
I grew up my whole life on a ranch in Durango, Colorado. My passions outside of photography and videography include any adrenaline sport in the outdoors, such as white water kayaking and rafting, mountain biking, skiing, sailing, etc.
My videography journey started with flying FPV (First Person View) drones and strapping a GoPro to the top. That got me involved in the world of cinematography. Now I am making films for clients and learning a lot and having lots of fun doing it.
My photography journey started with a trip to Patagonia, Chile, where a couple of my friends showed me what they do when they take photos. This got me hooked. Now I have completed an internship with two local photographers, and one of my favorite activities is adventuring around in the mountains and taking pictures. I love experimenting with new kinds of photography as well, such as spraying paint into water or taking 360-degree panoramas.
What inspires me to go out and take photos and videos is that I want to share my experiences and express myself through artistic means. I also love to look at places from a different perspective., whether that be a birds-eye view drone shot or a super close-up shot. Finding different ways to look at something ordinary is a way I like to set my photography and videography apart from others.
Independent Photography Project
For this project, I wanted to try filling a syringe with paint and spraying it into water. What I did is put butcher paper up as a background and used a glass trifle dish to put the water in. I could have used a fish tank for this, but emptying and filling such a large tank would be time consumptive and unnecessary. Then I put my camera on a tripod with an external flash with a defuser to the left of it. I put my camera on continuous fire and I had someone help me by pressing down the shutter button while I emptied the syringe into the water.
Reflection
This project was super fun, but it was hard because I have never done anything like this before. There were so many things I had to balance like the focus having to be perfect while keeping the paint in the center frame. You can see bad examples of both in the work above. The lime green paint pictures are all too far to the left while the blue and red paint pictures are out of focus.
After I did both the lime and mixed red and blue, I did the pink and you can see I learned from both of the others before because I kept the paint center frame while being in tack-sharp focus. I also played around with the amount of water I put in the paint. you can see that the first two photos in the gallery have a 2 to 1 water to paint ratio while the lime has a 1 to 1.
One of the hardest parts of this project was getting the focus and lighting down perfectly. Something else that wasn't hard but was annoying was emptying the water out every time I did a burst. This did make me appreciate my decision not to use a fish tank though.
Overall, this was a super fun project! I hope to try this again sometime and maybe do some different colors and color combinations.
Low Light Photography
Reflection
I expected this project to be fairly easy, but I quickly realized that it is a lot harder to get a large number of long exposure photos than I thought. Before this project, I had dabbled in low light photography and because of that, I fell into a false sense of confidence. I am glad to have that extra experience though because I knew what settings to use and what they would do to my image. Although this project was a lot of review on the content side, it still was fun to go out and take pictures at night.
Composition Basics
Reflection
For me, this was a pretty easy project because I have already completed an internship that involved photography. However, it was a good refresher and it was good to go over the golden ratio because I didn't learn anything about it. I did use all photos I had taken before this project was assigned so that was another aspect that made this easier. I am, as I said, glad to have this time to review these concepts.