Golden Section Ruler

The Golden Section Ruler was the last activity I completed. The steps for this were much different than Horizon One and Two. The idea behind this I believe was to create this ruler for the purpose for it to be used in future projects that we do. "You are more likely to use the Golden Section in your designs if you are able to conveniently access its measurements."(P 35) The first step was to change the size of the overall canvas in PhotoShop. Once that was done I made it have a background color and the length at 13 inches. Then I put another layer over top of the first layer and changed the color so you can see the differences in the two sizes and made that one 8 inches. Like Krause explains in the readings, it can be a very helpful and useful tool with compositions that I use in the future.

I uploaded this image from Google, which is very similar to the photo presented in the book on page 34. This spiral is often used to measure composition and makes graphics and designs more pleasing to view. "The Golden Section is an aesthetically pleasing division of space that is often used by artists as the basis for measurements within their compositions."(P 34) This graph basically shows and represents that most of the image should either be to one side or the other, by the divider that is presented in the photo. Images should never be directly in the center creating good composition and overall design.

Horizon Two

Horizon Two follows the same concept as Horizon One. This image however, we were asked to make the street the specific point of design. So in the cropping of this product there should be very little explanation on what the point of design is in this photo.

The only tool that was used during this picture and Horizon One was the crop tool. It is a simple tool but one that can make the biggest difference in a picture. Here the point of design is the street. Like Horizon One, I took out a large portion of the skyline to allow the street to be the main image that viewers would take away from this picture. I felt that this image was much easier to crop and create a point of design. I really like how the road just emerges from the bottom of the photo and just keeps going into the distance. The viewers I feel would be focused on the same thing. The street lights overhead almost make the pathway below and are a good sense of line direction for the photo. While reading Krause, there was an exercise on page 25 that emphasized on how important cropping is when it comes to landscape. "Visual drama can be enhanced by cropping images so that the horizon is clearly above or below the center of the image."(P 25) I felt as though I tried to do that to the best of my abilities. One thing however that I wish I would have cropped more was the skyline. There seems to be still too much of it there and while the focal point seems more clear than before it was cropped, I think less skyline would really make the street stand out that much more.

Horizon One

Horizon One is the first picture that we worked on in class. This picture is apart of the composition section that we are covering. Individually we took this image and were asked to make a focal point, or crop the image so it had some sense of placement and purpose. This image was difficult to work with; the image lacked symmetry and was not balanced from where it was taken, throwing off the lines and overall view of the picture.

I decided to crop out the cars on the far left and a large portion of the skyline. By doing this I feel as though the image now had the road as the focal point, perhaps the orange sign to the right or ever the car straight ahead depending on the viewer. I don't think this is the best crop job I have ever done but I do think by cropping out what I did, it gave more structure and a more "pleasing to the eye" look.
As talked about in class and through Krause's readings I have begun to understand that sometimes less is more. As Krause said, "the point of design is to encourage and facilitate communication between the viewer and the media being viewed. Effective design initiates this connection by attracting and holding the attention of the viewer through aesthetically satisfying and conceptually intriguing content."(P 16) In this case, there was too much going on in the picture to have a point of design. Though it was off alignment, cropping out the distractions and skyline gave the picture what it lacked and even if there was not one specific point after the cropping there was more of a connection between the viewer than there was before.

Google Earth

The visuals that I critiqued for this presentation were representational. One visual characteristic was the map that Borg passed around for the audience to see what he had been working on. PowerPoint was another visual characteristic that was used to show a brief overview of what JMU faculty has been researching. The two speakers themselves, Borg and and Whitmeyer were also a form of visual characteristics that I critiqued. The visuals that were created were from Borg and Whitmeyer and their students that helped and are still helping them with their research. I feel that the purpose of these visuals were to show the audience (which are JMU faculty, staff and students, as well as Harrisonburg and Rockingham residents) the idea of what they are trying to accomplish. The overall idea is to be able to build a network for the state for Google Earth and the ability to like and integrate data into other links and materials.

There is an assumption in this presentation that most people were familiar with or knew of Google Earth. However, even if you did not know much about Google Earth, by the end of the presentation you had a better understanding of what it was and what the professors are trying to create. The visuals were a perfect representation of what was being presented because they gave examples by going to the site (Google Earth) and explaining how it works. The visuals were created through microfilm by scanning maps from 1886-1930 and them printing the sets of maps as well as photo- shop to create the overall final images. The visuals were displayed by printed out maps that were passed around as well as an overhead projection that allowed us to see the website and view the content of the multilevel map template. The quality of the images was not affected by the display system because that is how it would be viewed if anyone in the audience were to use Google Earth on their own.

The message and meaning of the visuals that were presented were not affected that much by what was not shown. Both Borg and Whitmeyer did and are still doing extensive research to make this project in the making complete. The affect I feel that the audience will have to the visions and information that is not shown or told in detail about is less overwhelming and simplifies it for everyone else that is not involved. The voices that are herd throughout the presentation (Borg and Whitmeyer) are not the only ones that contributed to the visuals. A large portion of the research has come from students, which was not visually displayed at all. I did not learn any new terminology but I did learn how to navigate Google Earth through the visuals through this presentation and how "anyone interested in the past, present and future of a city" can use this cite to find out the history and geography of the Shenandoah Valley and eventually all of Virginia.