Big Week: Day 3

Big thanks to Luke for letting me read his book about photography, and letting me borrow his light meter. I was so confused when I first tried using it. I read up on it and I had a little difficulty understanding how it works. I just watched a video about how it works and I'm excited to actually use it tomorrow! I know I'll get the hang of it by doing it rather than just reading about it. 

I learned about incident and reflected metering. 

So what's the difference? 

The incident meter is aimed at the light source and measures the light source falling directly on a scene and is not influenced by the reflectance of the subject being photographed. 

Reflected metering reads the intensity of light reflecting off the subject and may vary according to variances in tonality, color, contrast, background, surface, or shape. 

There's no such thing as a "correct" exposure, but you can get a perfect exposure. 

Other things I learned today: There are A LOT of things I still have to learn about with photography. I think that's what makes this project nice. I'm learning, and realizing that I don't know as much as I thought I did. I took Photo 1, and I think I learned more in the past 3 days than I did in one semester of that class. 

I was thinking about the responses I got to the questions, and I guess I'm pretty surprised. I thought I'd get some really deep/witty/creative/awesome answers to my questions, but I didn't. The problem can be my questions, and perhaps my expectations. It's pretty stupid of me the expect good answers from these strangers. Heck, what do I know about them? That was part of this project in the first place. Although, I was expecting people to explain their answers thoughtfully, but many didn't. Maybe they just saw this as a stupid project, or maybe they just didn't know what to say. It makes me wonder now that I'm reflecting on it. Hm. My original plan was to use some answers as inspiration for the future, and I don't know how I'm going to do that with the answers I got. I think I'll just string some together or something like that. 

So I have 9 more strangers to photograph. I'm interested to see how that will turn out. Also, I thought of an idea while going through my project and what not. I want to try this out in the city or some place with a lot of people. I think it would be cool to follow up this project. Perhaps ask the same questions, and see if other people have more insight, and it will also show if it was just my shit questions that resulted in ordinary responses. Maybe I won't ask specific questions, but just ask them for a backstory of their life. I will figure it out when the time comes.

I really like talking to strangers, something about it makes me feel great. I personally believe that coming across new people is like peeling back the layers of our confusing world. One person at a time you can learn so much about something new. Everyone has their own stories to share, and you might hear similar stories, but it will never be the same. People talk with different voices, emotions, feelings, and movement. One of my favorite things is meeting someone who is so passionate about a specific thing or person such as music, or the love of their life. When people talk about what/who they love, it's just so beautiful. They close their eyes, move their hands, you can feel the passion oozing out of their heart into yours. Coming across strangers helps add perspective to this world, because no two people have the identical perspective of life. I'm some really strange way, that idea comforts me as much as it haunts me.