LECTURE 4 REVIEW: PICTURE STORIES

The lecture on PICTURE STORIES was one of the best ones so far. I'm not sure why, maybe it's simply because I love looking at pictures/photographs/stuff like that? I mean, after all, I am a tumblr addict (like that explains a lot). For the lecture, we looked at how pictures can tell a story and what constitutes a good picture. Pictures are not only constrained to photographs; they can be cartoons, drawings, paintings, sketches etc.

The lecture started off with a brief history of picture stories. They ranged from cave drawings, to painted scrolls, to stained glass windows. And then there were, of course, drawings, paintings and sketches. Then the camera came about and that brought about the birth of photographs. Of course, now in modern times, there are so many different types of cameras at our disposal. There are the vintage film ones, lomography cameras, polaroid cameras, dslr cameras, compact digital cameras, camera phones and so on... They cater to everybody from the amateurs to professionals, genuine photography enthusiasts to hipsters (I know this is gonna irk some people), photojournalists to paparazzi, social media addicts and much more. With technology nowadays, photographs can be instant! One can snap and immediately upload the photo onto the internet - it's that fast!

We also talked about digital manipulation (essentially, photoshop!) and faux-tography. Well, I could start a whole different debate about this but let's leave this for another time. The bottom line here is just - JUST HOW FAR SHOULD WE GO WITH IT? I can safely say that digital manipulation has distorted society's perception of beauty and how people should look like and to me, that's really unhealthy for society. It puts too much pressure on society to look like the "majority" and young kids are lapping this up through the media.

Picture stories not only encompass still photos but moving pictures are also included. Movies, television news are some examples of it. They can range from the silent film of the past to the current ones in cinemas. One good example I can think of now is the latest silent film, The Artist, that was released only recently. Well, I haven't caught it (though I'm dying to) but from what I've managed to gather from the trailers, it's really good.

And of course, to conclude, here's the perfect quote:

"A picture has no meaning at all if it can't tell a story."

~ Eetu Silanpaa

TUTORIAL #2:
Being kinda lazy, I shall give a brief summary of tutorial #2 here...

Tutorial #2 was basically a continuation of the lecture on pictures. We did an activity on assigning pictures to an article we read. And looked at certain pictures and voice our opinions on them. Of course, not to forget, we gave suggestions on what were some of our favourite pictures.

And yes, that's about it for the lecture and tutorial on picture stories.

Stay tune for a post on a couple of my favourite pictures! (: