Typology Assignment for Digital Photo

So doing required classwork isn't exactly getting the most out of life, but I still wanted to share one of our assignments we have done so far.

The assignment was to create a photographic typology.  I'll give you a textbook definition and then how I interpreted the assignment.

There wasn't any solid definition of this I could find online, but this sums it up nicely:

Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner; to be fully understood, the images must be viewed as a complete series.

Kristine McKenna, “Photo Visions”, Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec 1991.

The way I interpreted this assignment, especially from the examples viewed in class, was that it was a grouping of photos on one document that have identical composition and subject matter, with minor differences between each shot.  Some typology work is simply astounding and conceptual, but our professor expressed that this was a technical proficiency assignment rather than an art project.  So literally I could shoot anything.

My first idea fell through due to the circumstances of my setting and what I planned on working with.  As I pondered what I could possibly shoot my eyes scanned over the top of the cabinets at my friend's apartment and I noticed the nice variety of Bacardi bottles, among the rest of the collection, which were largely similar and each one was a different flavor.  So it was settled.

Using the back porch of the same apartment I shot in the only spit of light that seemed to shine through.  I was forced to shoot these bottles with a strange background because of this.  My professor critiqued that the shadows and all the lines and things that are going on in the background were in competition with the subject, and the background would have been even more so had I not put on the creative twist I did.

At first I wanted to blur the background more with a Gaussian blur, but I wasn't content.  Then I thought about darkening the background a bit to make the bottles pop a little more.  Unsatisfied with that approach as well I decided to colorize them using similar colors from the bottles themselves.  After all, there was one of each color, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to arrange them in Nintendo player color order (player 1 is red, player 2 is blue, player 3 is green, and player 4 is yellow).

This work by Kyle Dodd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
For those photoshoppers who are wondering how this is done (it's pretty straight forward), I used the quick selection tool to get as much of the bottle as I could and used the polygonal lasso tool to add or remove the remaining selection.  I refined the edge next, cranking the smoothness between 60-100 and feathered the edge 1.5 pixels (I wanted to conserve the edge of the bottle).  Then I inverted the selection and used that mask to colorize the background, at 40% saturation for each.  As an added detail, I removed the tanish-red-orange cushion which each bottle was sitting on from the reflection within the bottle itself, and tweaked the red in the Bacardi icon until each was about the same red.  Also I applied an unsharp mask to the entire thing to help the bottles and the text on them pop.

Ok, so maybe it isn't so straight forward.

We are beginning our conceptual work in this class now, and our first assignment is dealing with diptychs and panoramas, working with multiple photos and text to illustrate an idea or concept.  I will post them up too if I am proud of how they turn out.