Midterm idea

As I said in class, for my midterm project I am thinking of doing a photographic comparison/analysis of rural, small town, life versus the fast paced urban life of Chicago. Moving from an extremely small town to Chicago was major culture shock (in a good way) for me and I constantly find myself comparing things here to how they were where I grew up. I would like to do a comparison of some things such as the main street in my town versus a main street (Michigan Ave) in Chicago. I would also like to do comparisons that aren’t so obvious. I’m still working on compiling a list. I think it’s interesting how many similarities and differences there are between city and rural life; the similarities aren’t so much downtown, but in the neighborhood I live in. I live northwest of downtown in the neighborhood of Ravenswood. It’s a much different environment than downtown, but still the city experience. It is much different than I expected it to be, living in Chicago. When I used to think of Chicago I would simply picture the skyline and thought that everything in or around the loop was all there was to the city, but now I know much differently. With my project I feel like I would need to decide if I’m going to focus on life downtown, or in my neighborhood. I feel like in my neighborhood would be best because it’s where I live and I’m comparing it to where I used to live, but downtown would have a more dramatic contrast. However, I think focusing on the little details (such as spacing between houses, things like that) of the difference of my neighborhood and where I come from would help me to narrow and focus the project. This is one of my worries of this idea for my project. I feel like I have so many ideas of things that could use for comparison, that I’m not sure if I would get the message across because it’s so broad.

For this project I would want my shooting to be done under overcast, flat light. I feel this would give the same feeling to all of the images and not allow for any in one place or the other to “outshine” the other images with dramatic light. Flat even light is the easiest to control and have constant, and in a project where a comparison is being made I think it’s important to have that constant. I also tend to like images that are a little more flat and focus on things that aren’t super flashy or dramatic. I tend to be drawn to more mundane or worn-down things, and I think flat light goes well with that idea.

I’m not quite sure how I will approach this assignment technically; but, however I do it I would need to keep it the same for both places that I’m shooting. I usually tend to use shallow depth of field in my images, however if I’m going to be shooting buildings, streets, or landscapes in this project I will have to use a deeper depth of field. I tend to have my images balanced asymmetrically, and would like to continue that with this project. It might be harder to have direct comparisons this way, but I feel it will be visually more interesting and could add something to the work conceptually.

Color theory wise, I’m thinking that I would try to ally the colors to each other within the two different places. With the flat light the colors should remain fairly constant saturation wise, and I would like to try to have them all connect and feel cohesive through color, rather than having them be a stark contrast to each other.

All of this is a fairly rough draft of some ideas I’m having. I would really like to hear your guys’ feedback and get some ideas to focus my project further, or figure out if I should change it completely. Narrowing it down is my main concern with it. I feel like I tend to have ideas that are too broad to be compressed into the project, get the correct message across, and feel cohesive.