AKesweder & NMontz Video Collab

Ashley Kesweder

Unexpected Smiles

Wanderlust

The Girl Who Played With Fire - A.Kesweder

I chose to remake the cover of "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson. The original cover is just an orange with a light/fire element swirled across the cover, really giving no interest to the novel. I chose to show a girl, but vectorized her, removing the color and many key features that could really personalize the woman. Doing this still gave mystery to her but added interest. I then added the fire element to the side of her face, implying that the fire and her would soon intertwine in an important manner. I haven't read the novel so my intuitions could be true but very well may not be.

Books, books, books, books, books - Champion

      A book cover designer I am not. I had quite the number of ideas for book covers, but not the necessary skills required to complete designs. So instead, this rather simplistic design is used. The book itself deals with the adventure of a single particular grim reaper. Although the story somewhat follows the premise of the show "Dead Like Me", it's change is that death begins to communicate with the world. At first it's a communication about the ceasing of death due to complaints. Then, the return of death with quixotical fore tellings. All the while, death plucks away at her typewriter to communicate with the outside world.
    The image is created with the font Old Typewriter and a picture of an old typewriter. The original book can be found here: Click me!

The Stand, By Stephen King

I chose the book The Stand by Stephen King, I thought it would be interesting to try something a bit simpler, as his covers are usually pretty detailed. I used to threshold tool for the hands and face. Since they were separate things, it was hard for me to get the person to look anatomically correct.

Fun with Vectors! - Champion

To be honest, I have no idea how to create abstract art with much purpose. So, instead, I played around until it became an abstraction of non-sense. The two halves are inverted reflections of each other regarding the color, with the letters themselves being warped mirror images...sort of. The middle shape was mostly because it looked empty. Sorry - no real deep thought in this one. :-\

Symmetry? - Nick Montz

For my abstract image, I chose to use a sort of swirly symmetrical pattern made out of letters. After making it though, the image seemed too symmetrical, so I used some colors in the background in random places and found that it broke up the symmetry nicely

Ashley Kesweder

The original font for this is Myriad Pro, a san serif font, at 250pt.
I connected the X's to created the lattice-like pattern on the outside then mixed it up a little with the O's in the inside. It still gives a pattern-like feeling, but it's one that's not as expected.
For the background, I first gave it a solid fill color then a smaller, darker color in the middle to give a feeling of depth with the use of the color block.

Kerning game!

http://type.method.ac/

My Room

For my photo montage I chose to use a blown up perspective of my dorm room. You can see a nearly 360 degree view of the room. The photo is very chaotic and there is a lot going on. I feel that this conveys the sense of the average male dorm room as a freshman in college and it was interesting to see all of the things that make my room what it is in one photo.

Fast times on planet Earth

         I always tend to wonder what the Earth must have seen in its 4 billion years as it goes about the cosmos. Then, of course, I think about  all of us on this planet and it just spirals out of control from there. Often, after going about that thought spiral - hours have passed and what I was doing has now changed, or grown cold from neglect. Eventually, trying to recollect lost time, I always depart this meandering of the mind with a lingering thought of my prior exploits.
        These panels basically embody that, with or without the sappy story. I was hoping to convey a larger time expanse than I ultimately ended up with. However, I thought about this at great length (and yes, even went off into day dreaming as aforementioned) and came to the conclusion that the sun setting, to the exposition of the stars was an apt metaphor. The first panel is the sun, being generally concomitant to productivity, setting and showing the departure from a functional task. The inner panels are the transition between the two states. The center panel actually contains the last remnants of a lens flare from the sun, but also the first hints of the night from the last panel. In the last panel, the Milky Way cloud can be seen. In a cheesy way, this is signifying what dreams are made of and the emergence of this iconic period of our days...and all that poetic jazz. In the beginning, I thought this was just a neat idea. In the end, it still is a neat idea...just a lot more metaphor attached to it post hoc.
       Now, the technical aspects. This image is a combination of over 30 images. The images of the valley were taken atop South Mountain at the end of Summit Rd from 5pm - 7pm. I set the tripod and used vertical orientation to shoot the panorama to minimize visual distortions. The last panel contains two separate images of space. One was taken at Needles Vista, at 1am, using an equatorial mount and drive to minimize motion blur from Earth's rotation. The second was taken from the Carlsbad Caverns, NM,  entrance at roughly 11pm. The two space images were then combined to create a composite of a close-to-actual view of the Milky Way seen above Phoenix...if one could see the Milky Way above Phoenix. In all, I collected over 450 images to create this piece.
       The first four panels are all HDR creations with 5 bracketed photos each using  f-stop 3.5, ISO 200 (Simulated), Focal 27mm/18mm, fastest shutter speed: 1/8000, slowest: 1". Once I had the five images for each panel, I constructed the HDR image using the same base numbers for each variable and then tweaked for time of day changes. The first panel contains no edits, and only minor color correction after the HDR process. The second panel contains color/light bleeding from the first panel. The third panel contains minor amounts of the same bleeding. The fourth panel contains light bleeding from the fifth panel, in nearly the same ratio as the second panel to the first. The fifth panel was comprised of an HDR image and the composite shot of space. I decided to edit this last panel to show what one could see if there was no smog, or light pollution. It gives a bit of fantasy to this image, but it doesn't depart from reality...just ignores a few finer points of our cities polluted reality.

15 Seconds of Bravery

It seems that football consumes my life anymore. I found it almost laughable when I found that I could use being the photographer for my brothers game to my advantage. Though, if I was already going to be there, with a camera, and I knew what I needed to do, I might as well! Plus, I was given access to the field this last game, making it all the better.
What I chose to do is take the images of a passing play to show what can happen in a matter of probably 10-15 seconds. I saw the play in front of me and just snapped the shutter as quickly as I could, moving the lens along with the play, careful to line up the horizon line each time to allow an easy progression of time within the mind.
Really, there's nothing fancy, just a fast shutter speed, 1/400, large aperture, f/5, simple alignment within Photoshop and brave boys who are passionate about football.

Michael Champion

I loathe self-portraits. Specifically, of me. I'd much rather be behind the camera rather than in front of it. So much so, that over the course of several days trying to draft an idea for this - I stared at a wall, then a ceiling, then just tuned out. In the end, I conclusively decided that I cannot, nor particularly care to, create a self-portrait of my own device. Instead, I collected images of me taken by others...often against my wishes. However, in reflecting on this, I feel that this is a better representation of myself through others than what I could hope to accomplish with photographic self-reflection.
Technically, there is not much to this image. It's a collection of shots over the course of six years showing a variety of ways other's have seen me. I simply compiled them in a somewhat representative way. The specifics of the images are that I cleaned out noise, various aberrations, and tried (my best at least) to enhance the image containing fire - taken on film, and then scanned...by a gerbil. In the end, I added borders for some compartmentalization. Oh, and made it black and white and simulated ~1600ISO film. I do miss film...
Lastly, I -loathe- self-portraits of myself.  

Ashley Kesweder

During the drafting stages of this project, I knew that I wanted to have myself in the portrait and that I wanted my eye to somehow have a dominance in the photo. I took many photographs and played around with them a bit, but I was unhappy with my results. Those photos all had my eye wide open, setting a more joyful and optimistic tone. After being disappointed with those, I went back and took this picture. I used a larger aperture, f/5, for a narrower depth of field to still give me the focus I wanted on my eye. Having my eyes closed and my head titled down, the mood is instantly altered.
I took the raw image into Photoshop and got a little crafty, I suppose. I took my image and darkened the highlights quite a bit and then completely chopped up the image to give it this collage-like feel. My life doesn't always fall perfectly into place. It has it's ups and downs and it's complications; I wanted to portray that in this piece. Things cannot always be put into one perfectly square picture that's full of bright colors and straight edges. There are holes, shadows and jagged lines, that is what I show here.

Nick Montz

For my self portrait I tried to choose a picture that best represents my personality. I enjoy being outside, and I am never really in a serious mood. It is important to me to not take anything too seriously and try to have fun with my life.