CLAM #8: Tropos and Visual Literacy

Okay, I know this is way late, but better late than never??

This week we learned about the tropos of digital images, or the context of them. So first I'm going to talk about the photos that were in my digital photography post from last week.

I'll start with the picture of the frog:

I really didn't want to show where the frog actually was (on the glass door in front of my house in Myrtle Beach). I used the flash and reflection off of the glass door to kind of disguise it some. Originally the frog was in the middle of the frame, so I cropped the photo to make it fit the rule of thirds more.

With the ducks it was all about lighting. I wanted a tight picture of the ducks, but I also wanted to include a good bit of their habitat, I especially liked that you can see the rocks through the water.

In this photo of my TOMS I really wanted to emphasize how worn they've gotten. I wanted to focus on the dirt on the bottom of the shoes. The color of the lighting emphasizes the wear they've been through. To me this photo tells a story of well-loved and worn shoes, and the area of focus, the lighting, and the horizontal composition all help convey this message.

With this photo my favorite thing was the contrast. The white snow against the dark statue is great to me. I also like how his knee closest to the camera is positioned, it gives the photo depth. In the vertical version of this photo there was a lot of tree in the background. This version shows more of the setting that I wanted: the statue in its natural habitat, with the University in the background. The intention of this shot is to show the beauty of the campus and this history.

I really liked the article about Visual Literacy. I think that visual literacy definitely contributes to Cultural literacy. A lot of visual literacy is universal. There was one part of the article that I didn't completely agree with. The article talked about the shift from text to visual literacy, but I think that text is a form of visual literacy. We use visual aspects of text, like size, color, italics, and bold, and then the grammar portion of text, like word choice and style to convey a message with text, and these are visual too. We use them to emphasize words and thoughts and to give our text a certain feeling, just like we would with focus, color, zoom, lighting, etc in a photo.