Masters of Illusion

I thought the Masters of Illusion video was very interesting.  I love art history so all of the references and anecdotes about famous artists from the past were very entertaining to me.  The part about linear perspective and how it was developed and discovered was very thought provoking.  I had never thought of perspective as something that had to be discovered, I had always just taken this knowledge for granted.  I also never really thought about artists as being sort of mathematicians and scientists like they are portrayed in this video.  Some of them, such as Uccello, seem so dedicated to their craft its obsessive.

Errol Morris on Photography

            This photographer seemed very insightful and had a lot of great assertions about photography.  I would definitely agree that most people, myself included, tend to forget that photos are connected to the physical world and exist outside of that one small frame.  I definitely agree with the statement that all photos are in a way posed because they always leave something out.  You cannot notice what is not there, but sometimes that might tell more than what is actually included in the photograph.  I also agree with Morris’s assertion that further investigation is needed to really understand photographs because they are so decontextualized

On Photography

            This article by Susan Sontag describes photography in many different ways.  I thought when she described photos as and experience that has been captured made a lot of sense.  When I’m on vacation I take hundreds of photos because I try to record or capture all of the events that take place.  She also described photography as a means of basically collecting the world.  You can collect the knowledge from the photos and literally hold hundreds of photos in your hands at one time.  Another point that resonated with me was that photos seem to be irrefutable evidence.  Many times photos or videos are what catches fugitives so this statement makes a lot of sense.  Although photos seem to portray evidence and fact, like Sontag says, it seems that photos interpret the reality like paintings do because nothing that is just one image can accurately portray reality.

The Photographers Eye

            I found this passage to be very interesting.  I am not really into photography so I have never researched or learned very much about its history or thought much about its intricacies in general.  I liked the part where the author compared and contrasted painting and photography.  Being a painter myself I found the differences stated by the author to be very revealing about the essence of both photography and painting or other kinds of art.  I also liked the part where the author states that photos are more like symbols of reality not stories or explanations.  This statement seems to embody the reality that photos are just one single frame and that is all the information you can gain from them.

Camera Lucida

           I found this essay kind of hard to follow but the points that stuck out were very powerful.  The author talked about how a photograph attests that something has existed, although with Photoshop and other programs now you cant be 100% sure what you see is reality.  One quality about photos that really connects with me that this author talked about is how the photo makes you think and wonder about all the circumstances, not just the one frame of reality that is visible.  Especially old photographs make me wonder who the people are, what they are doing, and what is their story.  Photographs only give you enough taste to spark your curiosity.  The most powerful part of this essay in my opinion was at the end when the author states that photos are violent because they force you to see and accept their reality, there can be no other interpretation than the one that is visible to you.

Definition of Obtain

obtain: to gain or attain usually by planned action or effort

Parts of the Letter Reflection

       When I first looked at fonts I did not really realize that there were so many individual parts to them, let alone names for all of these parts.  Typography is evolved from handwriting and has been evolving for around 500 years.  Letters are all made up of strokes or stems, just like the strokes a pen makes when letters are written.  Some of the various parts of letters that were discussed in this document are serif, bracket, and stroke width.  These parts all have to do with the body of what makes up the letter.  Serifs are the short strokes that finishes off the major strokes.  Brackets are the curving joint between serifs and strokes.  Stroke width is the varying thickness of the stems and strokes that make up the letter.  There are several terms that relate the overall height of letter such as baseline, cap height, and x-height.  Baseline is the invisible line that all letters sit on, cap height is the height of capital letters from baseline to the top, and x-height is the height of all lowercase letters which is determined by the height of the lowercase x in a particular font.  Any letter such as a b or d that has a stroke that rises above the x-height is called an ascender.  Other words that describe specific points on letters are the apex, crossbar, vertex, final, and terminal.  The apex is the uppermost point on a capital A and the crossbar is the bar that crosses the middle of the A.  The vertex is the lowermost point in letters such as V and W.  An example of a final is the stroke that hangs over the rounded part of a lowercase a and the terminal is the tail that comes off of a lowercase a.  A bowl is a rounded part, whether open, like in c, or closed like in o, that describes the negative space, or counter, within.  An eye is like the little closed portion of the lowercase e, barbs are the hook like strokes on the end of capital C's, spurs are the small strokes on the bottoms of G's, and tails are the strokes that hang off of Q's.  Lowercase g's have several special features such as ears, the little nub that comes off the bowl and links that connect the bowl to the loop below.  K's also have special parts such as the upper diagonal stroke called an arm and the lower called a leg.  These two meet in an area called the crotch.