NAOMI BASTIAN DESIGN. personal photography

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1 NAOMI BASTIAN DESIGN personal photography

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Macro: 3 Likenesses: 7 Surroundings: 11 Experimental: 19

3 Up Close and Personal With just a few macro light tubes, I was able to discover a whole new world of miniatures. Nature s beauty is better appreciated up close, where the smallest details can be reflected in a few drops of water and brought into greater clarity through tight focusing. I photographed these flowers under an LED light with macro light tubes, and then edited the photos in Photoshop. I used a large aperture to blur the backgrounds and focus distinctly on the small details in the flowers and water droplets. 3 MACRO photography Macro photography is by far my favorite form of photography. It requires an enormous amount of patience and forethought, and extremely good lighting. But once you ve managed to capture a perfectly focused shot, it s incredible to see the details apparent in things you can so easily take for granted. It s so much easier to admire nature when you can see every part closely. The miniature worlds that can be seen in macro photography will never cease to amaze me.

4 These photos are of my jewelry collection, including a miniature castle that was a gift from my mother. I find these diminutive objects to be much more patient models, although the amount of time it takes to accurately focus almost outweighs the ease of photographing still subjects. I used a silk scarf to create an appropriate background, and heaped my jewelry and watch into a small dish. The castle was surprisingly detailed, and the blurred background suggests a fairytale setting.

5 LIKENESSES portraits 7 Most of the portraits on these pages were taken in Bannack, Montana. We had volunteers modeling in period clothing for portrait shoots, as well as specific lighting set-ups. For these portraits, we used Einstein strobes, natural lighting, reflectors, and standing flashes. I ve always loved portrait photography for its ability to capture the best in people, and I love that these photographs were able to emulate the magic found in these makeshift portait studios. The costumes may be from thrift stores or the theatre department and the models may just be former COMM students, but with photography, they can become other people entirely.

6 For my first experiment with portrait photography, I was luckily in Utah with the rest of my family. My mother had no option but to let me use her as a model (good thing she loves me). My cousin Owen, on the other hand? He was only too happy to help out. Unfortunately, my idea of him helping out was him looking cute, smiling, and staying still for pictures. His idea was to spray us all with bubbles and run around until we wrestled the bubble gun from him in an effort to keep him from cutely intruding into all of my mom s portraits. My mother was much more well-behaved, for once, and we got more conventional pictures from her shoot.

7 Depth of Field SURROUNDINGS Using depth of field creates either sharply focused photographs containing entire fields of vision, or they focus on one specific subject to establish clarity and precedence. I tend to favor shallow depths of field, especially when photographing outside. These photos were taken on an obscenely windy day (what other kinds of days are there in Rexburg?) and it only heightened the blurred effect of the background. The trees were whipping crazily in the background, so I focused on the trunks. landscape and environmental If the ladybugs had enough awareness of their surroundings to care whether or not I was sneaking up on them with my camera, they might have been offended. But since I doubt ladybugs are ever particularly mindful of humanity, they were obligingly still even in the middle of the enormous windstorm. I took several photos of them, and this was the first photo I had ever taken during this class that made me feel confident about my photography abilities. Mastering something as simple as depth of field made me feel as though I had conquered one of Hercules labors. I never got as lucky as I did with the photogenic ladybugs, but I hope to find opportunities like this again (hopefully when I ve brought a macro lens!). 11

8 HDR Editing Bright and sunny days are great for beach days and sunburns, but are not exactly ideal for photography. One of the solutions for photographs that are either overexposed or underexposed is HDR Toning, which is accomplished by using a tripod and a lot of patience. I captured three images of the exact same scene; one underexposed, one overexposed, and one that was closest to the exposure I actually wanted. During the editing process, I used all three pictures and the HDR Toning option in Photoshop.

9 Abandoned Places Photography of abandoned places has always been one of my favorite things. Abandoned theme parks, shopping malls, museums, or even homes provide endless sources of fascination. What do we leave behind after all of us are gone? What s left after all of our belongings and personal ephemera have dissolved? Humans are obsessed with the notion of leaving behind a legacy, something to remember. In Bannack, nothing is left but the stories told by the Park Rangers and the few buildings remaining of an actual community. Seeing the wreck of broken rafters, sagging wallpaper, torn vinyl tile, or shaky staircases reminds me that nothing we leave behind is permanent, and this isn t necessarily a bad thing. We can find beauty in the eventual decay of the things we leave behind, and that s what I try to capture with my own photography. Exploring the interiors of the abandoned buildings in Bannack led to many surprises. From the exteriors, Bannack looks like any ordinary ghost town. While we were there, one of the National Park Guides told us that the town had actually been inhabited until the 1970 s. Some of the buildings, such as the Hotel Meade, the jailhouse, and the saloon looked as though they hadn t been touched since Bannack s first incarnation of a mining town. However, some of the houses, while appearing very ordinary from the outside, contained treasure troves of vintage wallpaper, tile, and pastel paint colors that seemed out of place for an abandoned mining town. I was expecting Bannack to be more like Pioneer Village at Lagoon Park, with worn interiors and some abandoned pioneer-era utensils lying around. But in Bannack, there were very few things left behind. Only one of the houses was left with any actual furnishings, and I suspect it was dressed up for the tourists like me. There were occasionally random chairs or tables left in houses, or a lace curtain hanging over an abandoned stovetop. The cupboards and closets were bare, and the wallpaper was sloughing off the walls and bulging in strange places. Other visitors (hopefully no one from my group) had scrawled their initials and messages in the walls.

10 The floors were slanted in a way that set off my extreme fear of heights, and any remaining staircases had to be cautiously investigated. Most of these photographs came from prowling around Bannack on my own, discovering the ruin of these houses that had been inhabited no less than 40 years ago. The comparatively bright colors of the paint on the walls and the wallpaper were in shocking contrast to the decay that surrounded them, and it piqued my interest so much that I am longing to go back and do a larger photo series.

11 EXPERIMENTAL creative editing 19 Creative editing is one of my favorite things to do with Photoshop, because it allows me to create effects no camera can achieve alone. The picture on the top right is a Levitation portrait, which was taken by posing my model on a bench, taking the picture of her, and then removing the bench and model and retaking the picture. The photo of the doll was inspired by the Twilight Zone and the X-Files, both of which feature episodes with terrifying porcelain dolls. Since Bannack is a ghost town, I couldn t leave without some ghostly pictures! To create the photograph featured on the left, I took two different photos of the model walking down the steps and used a slow shutter speed. Combining them in Photoshop resulted in the ghost you see on the opposite page!

12 NAOMI BASTIAN Naomi Bastian is from Mill Creek, Washington, and was born and raised in Utah. She has loved taking pictures ever since she could operate a camera, and she wants to continue her family legacy of photography. Naomi is a web designer, graphic designer, and illustrator. She hopes to keep learning and growing so that she can add photographer to that list. She specializes in landscape and macro photography, but loves capturing any and all beautiful scenes and moments. Naomi attended school at Brigham Young University-Idaho and majored in Web Design with an emphasis in Design. She loves freelance work, personal photography, illustration, and graphic design, and tries to challenge herself in all of those areas. This photo of Naomi was taken by Rachel Bergman of Gatsby Nouvel Photography. All other images, editing, and design layouts have been created by Naomi Bastian.

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