Josh Cerf

This is the shot that can occur any time any place.   However, it usually happens at an inconvenient time when a camera is nowhere near.  It is the shot or shots that one misses and regrets missing, as he lay in bed at night, loosing sleep, over the simple fact that his camera was in his room rather than in his hand.  By looking up and becoming aware of ones surroundings, one may realize that this significant moment may happen several times a day or it may only happen a few times per week.  In either case my quest was to capture this moment, the Òindecisive moment.Ó  The following series of photos show how powerful being in the right place at the right time with a camera can be.

Ying Yi Chen

This series of pictures I made is simply based on the idea of capturing something unique in our daily life.  Life can be extremely boring. However, we have a magic power to make a difference. All we need is a curious heart to discover beauty around us. I am eager to use photography as a way to show intricate details and indecisive moments, which we always fail to notice, and to share that beauty with viewers. There is so much beauty in the world and I don’t want to miss all, so my camera goes everywhere as I do. Capturing something unexpected, unusual and bizarre is something I truly enjoy. Some motions are hard to capture, like kids’ movement since they always move so fast. Meanwhile, some moment may never happen again. I really treasure what I can capture luckily a lot.

Ziying Chen

Human is classified with 4 blood types: A, B, O, AB. For my final project, the theme of mine is to express that people in each type are manner differently with the same things. They would be a big difference with their character, way of behavior.  For the first 4 people, IÕm trying to show that people with each type will position diversely when they are contemplating. For type A, they would like to stand in front of the wall. For type B, they like to stand in the middle of the space. For type O, they enjoy walking around in the hallway. For type AB, they like placing in the corner. For those 4 pictures, I use an image of a part of the body under microscope as the background. In that way, it depicts my theme better. For the following 5 pictures, I was taking the pictures as telling a story. The story was happening in the basketball ground. The coach told 4 athletes that they couldnÕt walk across lines. The person with type A followed the coachÕs order and stand there without any movement. The person with type B crossed the line when the coach was standing over there. The person with type O crossed the line when the coach was disappeared. People with type AB didnÕt move and then told the coach where they were positioning when the coach was reappearing. For the final 3 pictures, I captured the indecisive moment when they were having fun, indicating that different people as a whole community can benefit from others that form the peaceful and beautiful world.

Francesca DeLuca

For my project I took photos of players on the boys Hobart Lacrosse team. I asked them each to write something personal that many people don’t know about themselves on pieces of paper and holding the paper in front of their faces.  The point of this project is to break a stereotype.  Many people feel that Division One athletes in general, not just Hobart Lacrosse players, carry their heads a little too high.  The facts on the pieces of paper show that athletes are just as regular as anybody.  I didn’t want the faces to be seen so then the viewer doesn’t know who they are as individuals.  I want the view to think it could be anyone on the lacrosse team who “makes a mean stuffing” or “won the spelling bee in 4th grade.”

Emily Desmery

This series is an abstract representation of poor self-image. The series begins with a mirrored image that has been distorted to show what the person is seeing when they look at themselves. Throughout this series, the people are being shown as regular people with many personal body issues. The photos where there are two different images on top of one another is supposed to represent thoughts, feelings or desires. The images are meant to show the subject appearing not as one would see them everyday, but rather as a reflection of what they see within themselves when they look in the mirror. These images were meant to show how different the relationship is between what we see in them and how they see themselves. This series goes on to demonstrate many different forms of emotional insecurity, and concludes with a final intense image to sum up teenage rebelliousness and insecurities.

Brittany Flaherty

For my final project, I wanted to develop my initial portraiture idea about using the most expressive features of the face, namely the eyes, to evoke emotion and highlight differences and similarities in women of various ethnicities. Eyes are one of the most obvious places where discrepencies in ethnicity can be seen, and I wanted to showcase not only the differences in eye color and shape across various ethnicities, but also to show how similar they are in their beauty and expressiveness. In order to eliminate some variables and just focus on ethnicity, I took pictures of just women on campus that were between the ages of 18 and 22, always of the left side of their face, and compared just two eyes in each photograph. I also reused some images to highlight how the features of an eye can vary depending on whether they are compared with those that are similar or different, which I believe helped to bring out the most beautiful and unique features of each person's eye. In addition, I attempted to capture eyes with different gazes, as well as colors and structures. These discrepancies encourage the viewer to wonder what each person is looking at and thinking about, and to draw conclusions by comparing the two eyes being displayed.

Kurtis Gibbs

For my project I decided to blend roommates into a single person. I wanted to see if roommates would blend easily into a single person or if it would be tough to combine them. I was looking for similarities between roommates and to see if there were any similar physical traits that attracted each other to be friends in the first place. I found that most sets of roommates blended relatively easy with the exception of two. The first two pictures are Tyler and myself and I though that we blended pretty well together. The next two pictures I had trouble blending and found it strange because I’m convinced that the two do not even like each other. It was also strange to find out that the roommates in pictures 7 and 8 blended into what could actually be a real person because they rarely leave each others side. I found this same result for pictures 10 and 11; the two students do everything together. Oddly, I found that the better friends the roommates were, the easier it was to blend them together and the less they got along, the harder it was.

Tyler Cassell

For my final project I created 14 portraits of 7 of my closest friends. I wanted to capture different styles of facial hair on these 7 people and then show them clean shaven. I wanted to do this to question why our society looks at facial hair as unprofessional and a sign of laziness. I asked them to grow their facial hair out for a week and either leave it the way it grew or give them the opportunity to groom it however the pleased. Only two of the seven left their hair the way it grew in, while the other five each chose a unique style some seen on a daily basis and others that are rarely seen. I then wanted to show how the removal of their hair would drastically change their image. I asked all 7 friends to shave the following morning and again pose for a portrait.

I used the same framing in each picture however the location and lighting and in some cases the distance from the subject are different. The reason for this is because I captured all but two of these images randomly throughout the day when the subjects were available.

Does the facial hair on these 7 subjects appear unprofessional? Would you think they were lazy due to their appearance? Are you able to recognize each with hair and without?

In malls and stores, at fairs and parks all over the country any individual can sit down in a private booth, close the curtain, and have their picture taken. By recreating the effect of a “photo booth” my motive is to capture people during their most spontaneous moments without the pressure of posing or acting out for an audience. When having their photo taken many people feel insecure with others looking at them, or even the photographer who may be judging them. When I took these pictures, I blindfolded myself with no one else around so the model would feel comfortable to do whatever they pleased. In many cases, this revealed the person’s true self and not who they were trying to pretend to be to impress and audience. In the portrait taken with two people I attempted to represent a relationship that might be hidden to others, but when revealed in private, the individuals express the closeness they have with one another.  I think that one of the most important aspects of portraiture is to express who the individual is through a photograph. Because these individuals are expressing themselves with no direction or inspiration, the spontaneity of the photograph reflects their inner self.

Evan Kirk

In these series of photos, I wanted to surpass the regular single portrait image. By blended more than one image, I feel that it brings out a lot more emotion and change from this persons first to last reaction. I wanted to blend sequence shoots, as well as opposites, such as happy and sad. The white face, orange shirt and black setting for the background are all meant to enhance the photos visually to make them more compelling to the human eye.  The orange shirt on the black background makes the subject pop out as soon as you see it. The white face paint is meant to force the eyes to look at the human features to show off the emotions of the subject. I feel that it gives it a feeling much like a mime you would see in movies or at a carnival. As single shots they look sort of normal and funny, but when I decided to add them together it made them extremely creepy I found it hard to concentrate on just one images as they blended.  

For over one hundred years the cinema has been drawing in viewers and capturing audiences all over the world.  Although the plots and story lines are prewritten and films are edited, movies generally attempt to recreate real-life scenarios.  Even in reality shows and movies today, nothing is actually “real”, because once a camera is placed before a subject true reality is essentially lost; thus creating a series of indecisive moments. 
For my final project, I decided to look at one indecisive moment in a series of classic movies, “the perfect kiss”.  Throughout history the ideal of romance and chivalry has greatly changed, so I decided to look at the differences that the cinema portrays throughout time.  Change in scenery, subject, camera angle, composition, and overall chemistry are all elements that greatly affect the outcome of these shots.  In this series I combined different moments surrounding the actual kiss in order to capture different aspects and outcomes of these moments.  I looked at different kinds of movies, from many different time periods, with a variety of different subjects, in order to capture the essence of what is considered as the acceptable and or ideal kiss in movies, as times and society change throughout history.   

Duy Nguyen

Human is a complex create. The ability to be aware of the Self, the desire to understand the Self distinguishes us from all other creatures on Earth. How much do we know about ourselves? It is human nature to constantly question the Self, trying to understand it.
Just how much can you tell about one person by looking at his picture? What characteristics, what personalities are shown and what are hidden? Is there more to it than just an expression of the face, a gesture of the body? I feel like a normal picture could not possibly express all the levels of complexities of the inner Self hidden inside person.
In my pictures, I’ve created multiple versions of myself in imaginary scenarios. The idea is that these pictures don’t only show a person, but rather the hard to grasp intangible aspect of that person: the overlapping layers of memories, ideas and  imaginations within one self. Maybe there are parts of us that we are not aware of, maybe there are parts that we have yet to understand, maybe there are parts that turn out complete opposite from what we thought. This is an attempt to express the different layers of the inner Self on pictures.

Alex Pugliese

For my final project I decided to look at how people use different things to display how they are as a person. When you look at these different photos you see a wide range of different types of shoes, hats and even a hair style. The point I was trying to make is that you can find out a lot about a person just by looking at what they have on or if you went to a person’s closet you could find out a lot about them. Also by looking at them you might be able to tell how they are feeling by looking at what they have on. Do you have any guesses of what they might be feeling? I wanted to make these pictures very simple with little to nothing going on in the background so that the viewer’s attention would be drawn to the subject instead of what is going on around it.

Xiao Lin

This project is a mix of portraiture and indecisive moments. It is one thing to have a person sit in front of a camera and take a straight on photograph of him or her but another thing to capture a portrait of the person performing an act. In this series, the subject goes through a strange house (a metaphor of him searching within the curious mind of his own), and let’s his curiosity roam. My job was to take a portrait of him when he’s performing an act that may be caught looking suspicious. The images in this series are placed side by side because I wanted to show a variation of the portraits and give different perspectives on the experience of these portraits. In each of the couplets, I decided to have an object in focus in one image and then the portrait of the person in focus in another. All these objects belong in the room that the subject decides to look at, the kitchen, bedroom, even outside. The objects are a significant part to the portraiture because it is representational of each of these places. The images are also placed specifically depending on the object, the subject and the images overall.