Final reflections

I found this course to be challenging and very informative. Coming into the class, I had virtually no experience or formal knowledge on working with or critically examining images. Although I had previously done some work with image manipulation in the past (mostly for fun, in photoshop), I had done so without any sort of basis in theory, and in some cases, without any direction (simply aiming for something that looked "cool" or "pretty").

The readings and class discussions really helped me gain a new perspective on all of the meaning that goes into and comes out of just about any given image. Sturken and Cartwright's Practices of Looking served as a good introduction to the concepts of visual communication for me as someone who had no previous academic exposure in the field. There were a lot of relevant general themes throughout the book, such as critical examination of a photographer or image-maker's intent, the effect of image angle and framing in shaping viewers' perception, and how different image styles and media are perceived differently depending on a viewer's background, nationality, cultural knowledge, or the era the viewer is living in. There were also several chapters that addressed particularly relevant issues in image perception in greater detail; some of the latter chapters (including the ones on advertising, postmodernity, globalization, and media in everyday life) were particularly applicable to visual challenges we are likely to face in our daily lives and careers, as well as to our sub-projects for this class.

However, once we began to read Kress and van Leeuwen's Reading Images, I found it to be incomparable in terms of the wealth of concrete, applicable information it provided on visual theory, complete with a grammar-based set of vocabulary for discussing it. Ultimately, I felt that it was Reading Images which provided me with far more theoretical concepts that I could use to discuss and (more importantly) improve my sub-projects. I found the chapters on narrative representations, viewer position, modality, and composition/framing to be the most directly useful, but nearly every chapter provided me with at least some information that I was ultimately able to use to enhance my own work.

The creation of my sub-projects was also quite challenging. The greatest challenge in the latter to sub-projects was simply mastering the technology and software needed to bring my ideas to life. In both cases, I felt that I was spending more time learning how to use these tools than actually making my deliverables, which was extremely frustrating, but will be very useful in the future if I use these same technologies again. I had an easier time working with Photoshop because I was already familiar with it; however, the digital remix still provided me with many challenges in turning my ideas into feasible imagery. Because the avatar sub-project came first, it gave me ample time to learn and improve over the course of the semester, so by the end, my avatar had undergone many transformations and I had a result that I was pleased with.

Overall, I feel that I got exactly what I wanted out of this class: an in-depth understanding of the influence that visual imagery has on our lives, the theory and language I need to critically examine and discuss that imagery, and the practice and knowledge that is necessary for me to thoughtfully and effecticely create and manipulate visual imagery myself.