Deborah Chen's Photography: Masters of Photography

Hi guys!

My Digital Photography project is to take pictures inspired by a Master Photographer, and my group all decided Gordon Parks. Why? Because his pictures show a lot of depth and emotions, revealing a deeper meaning. Since he lived from 1912 to 2006 in Kansas, he endured the WWII , Great Depression, and especially the Civil Rights Movement. He is a master photographer, taking pictures of different genres from political ones to fashion ones. In each published pictures he has, there is a sense of awe attached to these pictures, especially his documentary pictures about segregation. His subjects were usually people posing naturally or not with their surroundings. He took pictures of protesters, struggling African Americans, fancy women models, and little kids dealing with segregation. Some of his accomplishments is being the first African-American photographer of Life magazine, writing a book called The Learning Tree, and helping screen film the movie, Shaft. What makes him unique is that he keeps pushing forward despite the discrimination of African Americans in America during his time and is able to achieve the accomplishments that used to be deemed "white-privilege" only.

During this project, I learned a lot of work goes behind just one picture, Some people think it's a quick snap on the camera and they're done, but it's not always like that. Many times a photographer would take numerous shots just to get the one picture he or she wants. See my first picture for more details.

Enjoy and if you want to see the picture I was inspired by, it's under the picture.

My first picture in this post took me over one hour to set up the papers in a orderly, rectangular arrangement and take the picture without anyone's help. I took over 70 pictures until I was able to get the picture I wanted. The way I wanted it was arranged is that my old report cards and my sign makes a statement, similar to the one Gordon Parks had taken, that " We students are not defined by their grades anymore. We are more than that. We are humans with limits, not robots. We need to live and explore the world beyond our grades."

How I edit it was that I cropped some part of the picture and slightly the exposure level and white level in Camera Raw. I made it black and white by adjusting the saturation level. Also I changed the contrast, shadow, highlights, contrast, and clarity levels to get the affect I wanted.

Image Taken by Gordon Parks :A Police State

This image was created from using Photoshop by combining my friend, Stanley Gu, and an American flag in my classroom. My DP friend Samuel Sze taught me how to use Photoshop and to make the image seem real like. I tried my best and I enjoyed it. Also I adjusted the vibrancy and saturation levels and cropped the flag image a bit.

Image taken from Gordon Parks American Gothic 1942

I got a group of my classmates to pose out a shot of a group of cowboys in front of a drugstore. Instead, I have them pose in front of the library's window and it came out nice. After I changed the exposure level and cropped the image, I then changed the vibrancy levels to make the image black and white.

Image taken by Gordon Parks: Drugstore Cowboys 1955

This is my friend, Amandi Kwok, posing similar to the little boy in the original image taken by Gordon Parks. I cropped the image so that the beam she was leaning against was straight and changed the lighting because the sky seemed too bright compared to Amandi. As for all the pictures I have, I made it black and white. What is she thinking about?

Image taken by Gordon Parks: Young Boy on His Front Porch

I decided to combine three images of my friends in a pose similar to Malcolm X's speech pose. As a result, I have different pictures of them posing in their own special way. From left to right, we have Henry Yu, Samuel Sze, and Michael Sheng. Who do you think is more convincing?

As for changing the pictures, I each cropped them, adjusted the exposure, white, black, shadow, and highlight levels, and obviously changed the images to black and white.