Expectations vs Reality

Have you seen (500)Days of Summer?
If you haven't, stop reading now and come back when you have.
Just kidding.
Sort of.

Anyway, in (500)Days they use a split-screen montage when Tom goes to a party at Summer's house. One of the screens is Tom's expectations about the event: warm greetings, intimate conversation, vigorous making out, the works. The other side is the reality of the situation: awkward hellos, weird conversation, being bored.

Brighton made me feel like Tom.

Brighton is a beach town that boasts a happy (and gay, actually) disposition towards life. It has a famous pier, it has the Royal Pavilion, where Prince Regent (George IV) went to party with his besties, it has tons of little local shops, it has a beach - to go with its famous pier - and best of all, it's on the English Channel, the least threatening of all the channels.

Take a look at the pictures after the jump to see the reality spectrum (and also to feel better about your current reality):

Sally Mann at The Photographer's Gallery

The Photographer’s Gallery might be the strangest gallery space I have been in. It worked perfectly with the Sally Mann exhibition they put on – titled The Family and The Land – using the very structure of the building to physically structure her show.

            

The first room showed Sally Mann’s largest portraits; more importantly portraits, close-ups, of her children’s faces. The process she uses for these is particularly important because of their size (huge!). To make her images, Sally Mann uses the wet-plate collodion process, which makes the negative by coating a glass plate with collodion to make a wet emulsion: the plate is sensitized in a silver NO₃ solution and is exposed to light while still wet. 

We weren't allowed pictures, but I snagged one with the Hipstamatic app on my phone.

The process only allows about five minutes to make the exposure after the plate is sensitized, but the exposures seem long, because of the blur, shakiness and soft nature of the portraits. It’s almost as if the faces of her children are representing the, never still, scribbled movement of childhood and human life. Since the photographs are major close-ups at a massive scale, throwing the power of features and expression, along with the serendipitous nature of the developing process itself into a message of both the naïveté of childhood, as well as the insecurities associated with youth.
(more after the jump)

            

Fall Break (continued)

I think all of these break pictures are going to come at a slow rate, so it'll be like having a conversation, when details and stories are revealed little by little.

It's also a good way to disguise my procrastination.

Cassia Brooks

The Temper Trap (and why everyone should love them)

After a tremendously eventful fall break, I got to London and - I gotta say - I was relieved and looking forward to some schoolwork and a bit of peace. Peace, by standard definition around this flat, stands for hours upon hours of "couch-podding" also known as uninterrupted internet time. Which I did.

Everything would have been fine had it not been for this tweet:

Naturally, I entered. And at about 6:30pm I received an email announcing my triumphant win over other contest participants, and telling me that I should be at the venue at 7. In short, my friend Alyssa and I went to a FREE spontaneous Temper Trap concert, that doubled up as my birthday present for her (she's 21 today!) 

Three pictures from our adventure:

        

Alyssa Stone

Unfamiliar with The Temper Trap? Check out - what I think - is their best song and video:

The Right Way, The Wrong Way and The Railway

I'm starting to upload some  of my favorite shots I managed to take on my fall break trip. These particular ones were taken on a train from Munich to Prague. The trip was tiresome and my trains were delayed, but I guess one of the perks of sitting on a window-side seat for 8 hours is I got to take tons of pictures. Plus, the autumn light all the through the afternoon was spectacular.

Cassia Brooks

more to come!

View from the Top

One of my favorite assignments of the semester so far. View From the Top is the product of, as the name rightly suggests, the view from the top of a double-decker bus. Usually, I steer clear of pictures of traffic because - let's be real here - looking at pictures of cars is boring. But this time, since I had to, I tried to make my rainy route home (on the No. 7 bus to East Acton) as interesting as possible.

Istanbul

I've been trying to go in a new direction, creatively, when it comes to my pictures. So here they are. Some of my Istanbul pictures. More to come.