Departure Point - Ian Watson

For those who are curious, hi. I'm Ian Watson, and I don't know what to post here. I'm a photojournalism major out of Annenberg hall, and I don't really consider myself much of an artist, but hey, always nice to try new things.

I'm really not sure what all to write for this departure point. I guess it's a good idea to have a roadmap of where you're going when you start a journey, but honestly, I've always found that my best ideas come as I start to actually do things. Last semester, in the Visual Elements/Darkroom Portfolio class, I entered with no idea of what I wanted to produce and left with a few sets of themed images that told their own stories. While I don't want to be a one trick pony and do that yet again this semester, but honestly I feel that the same general lack of idea of what to do may prove to work out in my favor. Or, you know, it could not, since crit is rapidly approaching. Hoo boy.

I didn't do much photographing over this summer in any form, be it digital, film, or smartphone. This summer was pretty rough for a lot of reasons, but my DSLR also had a bit of an accident early on that has left the viewfinder busted, and while I've been moderately successful at shooting blind, it didn't help to motivate me to get out and actually do it often. What little work I did over the summer was portrait adventures with a few friends and documentation of an all weekend karate function I was at, none of which I've really dove into editing or touching at all.

Since getting back to school, I've been mainly shooting for my other photo class, the online smart phone photography course. The first theme is Black and White/Mystery, so I've been trying to think in grayscale and outside of the box. I've been thinking a lot more about light because of it (a good example is my opening shot), and some of the stuff I've turned in has been less of a mystery in terms of subject and more of a mystery in terms of, "Whoa, how does the light look like that?"

Really, my main overall hope and dream from this semester is to be all about the photo transfer. Hanging up photos on walls is cool and all, but if there's one thing I've learned from this horrible heat in an apartment that lacks A/C and feels like an oven is that photos and posters hung onto a wall last only so long before their tape or other binding material gives out (a whole hell of a lot faster if you're living in a place as hot as Satan's rear end, like I am). I am all about wanting to learn about photo transfers this semester. I would love to slap my photos on flasks, or on glass cups, or even turn them into some sort of translucent sticky thing that I can slam onto stop signs or walls or pipes and become an art creating miscreant. I have no idea what I'm going to produce for the upcoming darkroom crit, and I only have a faint idea of what I'll be able to produce with cyanotypes, but photo transfer? The options, and my potential, are limitless.