Plan of Attack

According to what I now understand is that I will be making tres videos to help document my experiences this semseter; the content varies from personal to professional to public. So essentially, I'm beginning planning the easiest the personal engagement. I'm thinking that the personal and professional might actually make a nice transition since I'm thinking of focusing on my personal experiences with the slow, relaxed social schedule of Spain from the way they casually indulge in tapas and sangria for hours to the oh so-flexible-it-is-barely-there time schedule of Spaniards lives. This laid back schedule contrasts sharply with the go-go-go mentality of the average American who values hard unflagging work. This feeds in nicely with the professional aspect that I've noticed in the Spanish way of design. To relate to architecture, one could compare the 3 projects Clemson students tend to do in a semester with the 1 project Spanish students complete in a semester. In Spain, the world of design is very detailed but doesn't seem to have the same rigorous timetable that it does in America, the work comes on a much less forced schedule which results in very different types of work. I really liked Bethany's video of her the ''au pair experience'' she had and found the video very interesting because it seemed very personal and yet professionally informative. I want to acheive the same kind of duality in my video.
I don't know I'll have to continue to develop these ideas but that is just what initially came to mind. I also haven't chosen a social or political issue to explore in the final video either. Over the next week or so I'll be working to better organize my thoughts and methods for conveying them in a storyboard.

Picture>1000 words

Photography continues be an incredibly influential art, it can capture the spirit of a person, an event. It can provoke emotion in a way that no other art can, it can bear a vivid truth that haunts us or inspires us or entertains us in a very special way. Now I am not attempting to make grandios gestures through my photographs, I'm simply trying to capture the spirit of the moment that I'm experiencing at the time. Here in a whole new world, I'm perpetually provoked to capture these moments through an obscene amount of photographs- I'm obviously not succeeding very well in my attempt to acheive quality over quantity here- , some good some not so successful. But it's true that whether I'm choosing them consciously or not, certain ''tropos'', aka rhetorical means, are present in these photos that help tell the story I choose.
This first image of Plaza Majorca in Madrid, I included people sitting at an outdoor restaurant in the frame but conveniently excluded the annoying SpiderMan street buskar off to the left. This helps tell a very particular story of a more traditional Spain, a Spain where traditions of spending long afternoons eating and drinking in the public squares alive, and strategically excludes the story of the Spain that lures obnoxious tourist acts like the over weight Spider Man wanna-be. I wanted to think of Madrid in this traditional sense because it was definitely a city of tradition in my experience, hence the sepia tone.

One more example of how I tried to use a little rhetoric is in this photograph of the Gard D'Oriente in Lisbon. This picture's angle really helps to capture the dynamic lines of the train station. It is a remarkable piece of architecture with dynamicism and movement unlike anything I've seen so to emphasize this even more so I attempted to  capture the spirit of the building at a lower angle running down the facade.

Some photos thus far

Normally when I travel, I get a little camera happy and take Pat's rule of  ''taking multiple shots'' a little too extremely and end up with hundreds of photos that a. stink and b. I never look at again. Also, I've noticed that once I get behind a camera, I'm separating myself from the experience; so my goal for my travels this time around is to focus on quality instead of quantity. I've collected a few of my favorites thus far...
This first one was taken in Lisbon, along the beach in front of  Torres de Belem. The Tower is offset a little which creates a little more dramatic feel to the setting sun behind.

The next photo is a detail of a graffiti wall in Barcelona. Who knew John Wayne had made it all the way over to Spain?

The next one is a panoramic view of the bay outside the main plaza in Lisbon, my favorite spot in the city. It was gorgeous to walk down the steps literally into the sea and have the water enter the plaza. This photo is an example of using a wideframe to acheive a panoramic view.

The last picture, is of a really interesting sculpture suspending from a bridge in Madrid. I thought it to be an exception of Pat's rule, since he said he had some really successful exceptions, it was shot looking straight ahead and is situated in the center of the photo.