This last photo session really was a fun and interesting. After two sessions and critiques, I’ve finally narrowed down a theme and found laws of Gestalt with relative ease. I decided during this last session to not use my phone. This time I went to the library and checked out a DSLR camera. I also decided to go down S.Congress during the afternoon, as I went during the evening during the other two sessions.

So during the last two critiques, I realized I never really had a solid theme. I had themes, but they weren’t very strong themes. However, this time I have a concrete theme with my photos that all follow similar laws of Gestalt. As you can see below, I ended up going with a themes focused on heads, human and not. I found these in a little store focused on Mexican and other various cultures. I took plenty of photos, around 110, but noticed how these all went together.

As I had said in my previous post, I was going to attempt and find Gestalt with people again, but this new theme I realized I had going on seemed much better to me at least. That and I wasn’t able to photograph as many people as I did last time. I although i did end up doing something similar to what I said I would do. I mentioned I would try to take photos of faces, and to an extent I did.

As you can see, the most obvious law of Gestalt present in my photos is Symmetry. Every face is nearly perfectly symmetrical. My photos of Frida and the demon mask follow the law of Containment, as they were on a frame and bag respectively. Meanwhile the skull and tiger pillow were three-dimensional. I really do like how these photos came out, and hope others in class will enjoy them.

Every photo session felt better than the last and I can’t wait to see what other projects we’ll do for class. Below is my contact sheet, the 4 pictures I’ve chose for the critique and edited versions of them.

So once again I traveled down South Congress to take photos. I ended up using my iPhone 6+ again, but spent much more time out and took much many more photos than you see here. I actually went down South Congress 3 times this week actually. Once on the 14th, my birthday when my family came to celebrate. I snapped some photos since I was there, only about 20. Then on the 15th I spent almost 3 hours on South Congress and took about 90 photos. Overall I ended up taking three times as many photos than I did my first time.

This time around, I decided to try and take photos that followed the laws of Gestalt. As you can see in my contact sheets, I have images that the Laws of Proximity, Symmetry, Common Fate and Good Gestalt. This most notable in the pictures of objects. The books (Proximity). The skull, cross, star, brick pyramid (Symmetry). The cicadas (Common Fate). And lastly, the apartment sign (Good Gestalt).

But as you can see I also took pictures of people, which was quite different. I was so used to taking photos of just objects last time I decided to out of my comfort zone and take pictures of people. One of them is of my parents which is one of the ones I chose as my favorites.

Now you may be wondering how the images of people relate to the laws of Gestalt. Well, since this was my first time focusing on really finding laws of Gestalt, I only had one thing I could connect the people with Gestalt. Clothing. In every photo of a person I took, their clothing follows some sort of law of Gestalt. My mother’s shirt followed the Law of Similarity and somewhat followed the Law of Continuity. The man with the guitar has a pattern on his hat that follows the Law of Continuity. The man in the plaid shirt followed Symmetry and the man with the cat just barely follows Proximity with the feathers on his shirt. While it isn’t easily conveyed in my photographs, Laws of Gestalt are there.

Next time I’ll try to connect the Laws of Gestalt with my picture of people in better ways. It’s much easier finding the Laws with objects. Perhaps I can do something like take close up pictures of people’s faces for Symmetry or even take pictures of groups crossing the street for Common Fate. I was trying something new and it came out decent. I can only try to improve.

Well, I can always try that in the last Gestalt photo session. I’m going to get even better photos than I have these previous times. I feel as though i am getting a bit better with my photography. I think I may even borrow a nice camera form the library for the last photo session. If not, my phone will do just fine.

I leave with my top 5 favorite photos unedited and edited that I’ll be printing for class on the 18th. I’ll be using the edited versions for my prints. (The first 5 below are the edited photos, the last 5 are the originals.)

For this first set of photos I used my iPhone 6+ to take them. I took all of them on August 31, 2017 during my first real journey through South Congress. I didn’t really know exactly what to look for when taking photos and took photos of things that caught my eye. As you can see it varies from signs, to plants and even graffiti. The top row of images are the original images I took, while the row below them are edited versions of their respective images. After analyzing which photos were my best, I realized a correlation in my photos.

For instance, The crosswalk graffiti made me imagine someone who was just fed up with waiting and decided to publish his thoughts with a few sprays of paint. The face on the mailbox was perhaps put there to give the mailbox a personality of sorts. The arrow pointing towards the ground make it seem as if something is hidden within the dirt and is just waiting to be found. And the odd face with a pompadour just seemed very silly to me, as it was the only piece of graffiti on the wall. I suppose I took these shots because they created a story in my head and I wanted to preserve them.

As for the picture of plants, I took them because I believe wildlife and plants are quite beautiful. At the time that red flower was the only flower that still vibrant in color and the little odd katydid-esque plants just looked quite nice. The cactus in the tire just looked silly but interesting to me and the cactus mural caught my attention as I had just taken the picture of the tire cactus.

Finally some of the more miscellaneous seem to all incorporate metal. The bike wheels as seen in my photograph were actually part of a larger fence made entirely out of bike wheels. Both the hotel sign and Twin Tires sign both caught my eye, as signs for businesses should which is why I took their pictures.  I believe at the time I took the picture of the barbed wire from the angle I did in an attempt to make it look like art. I think the message i was going for was something like “The sky is so grand and free, something like barbed wire could never restrain it.”. Does it work as art? I have no idea, but maybe.

While I’m not exactly a master photographer, I’d like to at least think the images I took came out decent enough. I know I could use much more practice and I’m ready for it. I’m sure as time goes on I’ll improve. We’ll see if i made any progress when I go back for a second time to take photos. Below you’ll find the 5 images I’ll have critiqued during my Visual Studies class on the 11th. They are my favorites of the bunch, I’ve also included the edited versions as well. The first 5 are the edited versions and the last 5 are the originals.

As someone who has looked into game design for quite some time, I’ve found that having creativity is vital to making a successful game. At the same time, you need to be able to have your game evoke some sort of emotion from the player. After reading both articles, I realized that many games use their creativeness to evoke emotion. These emotions vary from game to game as each can have different styles of gameplay, aesthetic and storyline.

Take for example Abzu and Dark Souls II. Two starkly different games, each offering their own emotional response from players.

Abzu, a deep-sea exploration game, is very much focused on it aesthetics. The underwater environments of coral reefs, grottos and countless colonies of fish it presents leave the player feeling relaxed and in awe of the world around them. While a story is present and gameplay is pretty solid, both are overshadowed by the creative aesthetics of the game. The story is very vague as its represented through underwater murals and the gameplay is fairly simple as it mainly consists of swimming through different areas and occasionally adjusting levers.

Dark Souls II on the other hand, is part of a series of game series infamous for its difficult gameplay in both single player mode and player versus player combat. While the story and aesthetics of Dark Souls II are interesting and captivating, the game depends on its gameplay to draw emotion from players. Many fans of the series play because of how hard the game is and to challenge themselves. Players may end up getting frustrated or even enraged at the game, but keep playing to achieve a feeling of success when they finally beat a boss they’ve died to 20 or more times.

Each game is able to evoke emotions from players because of how they use their creativeness to differentiate themselves from other games. They become unique in their own ways so they aren’t just seen as copies or imitations of other games. Many games attempt to imitate or reference what other game before them did, but it just doesn’t work the same. In order to grab a player’s attention and get a response from them, a game must use its creativeness to differentiate itself.

As an Interactive Game Studies major, I tend to analyze games as I play them. I have specific games I play when I want a challenge, or when I want to play something that doesn’t require too much attention. Some of my favorite games are quite different when comparing them to other favorites. This is because each game has something unique about it that I like.

For instance, Pokémon Emerald is one of my all-time favorites because of its story, art-style and music. Like most Pokémon games, the gameplay is exactly the same as past titles. Catch Pokémon, train Pokémon, battle Pokémon and repeat. However, the story, art-style and music are unique to that generation of Pokémon games and are what make it unique to me.

Meanwhile another one of my favorites, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, is a favorite because of its gameplay and difficulty. No matter how many times I play a level I can still die because I wasn’t paying attention or was trying to go too fast. But the feeling of accomplishment I feel when beating a difficult stage and maybe even finding one of the collectible gems is worth all the trial and error.

I hope to one day make a game that affects players in some way. Whether they enjoy the gameplay, aesthetic or even the story of my game, I’ll be satisfied knowing it touched them in some way. And while every player won’t be affected the exact same way, that’s okay. We all enjoy things for different reasons, it’s all a matter of opinion.