March 14- Progress Critique

The progress of the series that I am currently creating is starting to pick up the pace with me being available to shoot almost every day. There has been some slight errors on the actual technical portion of the series with the learning curve of how exactly the blur will accomplish the correct sense of movement and stability in the environment.  The environments are causing a slight problem with the amount of light that they are producing during times that the businesses are open.  The light is causing the long exposures to completely erase the fact that there are moving figures throughout the image.  I have come to a solution, making the individuals that are modeling and creating the blur to wear nothing but lighter clothing and forcing them to move as they are in slow motion.  With the individuals moving at slow speeds and the clothing being a lighter color, this is making the blur almost perfect. Another technical issue that I am currently running into is altering the numerous images and layering them in Photoshop to create one flawless image. With exposure times only lasting a few seconds, capturing a lot of movement in a fairly intimate environment is almost impossible. The technical side of the project is starting to finally reach the conceptual idea of the series.

            The conceptual part of the series is progressing faster than any aspect of the series.  After talking with numerous people and explaining what I had in mind at the beginning of the project has only made me reevaluate exactly what I am trying to produce.  I had started with the idea that this said environment that I am trying to portray is able to produce and shape individuals into what they believe their “personality” is.  I have realized that the establishments that I am photographing didn’t open yesterday, or even last year.  They were built 60+ years ago, even if the current restaurant or bookstore wasn’t open for business at the time of the building being built yet the space that they occupy is the same.  Individuals have passed through the space allowing them to claim that this bar, restaurant, or “favorite” spot to hang out is what makes them this ideal individual, a person that cannot be remade, when the reality is that hundreds of people have claimed the same space as their own, yet they come and go and the space continues to be there without alteration.  I want to capture the sense that the architecture of the space is not moving even though the changes in the numerous people that travel in and out of the space.  I am trying to influence the viewer to think that even if they believe they are important, there are numerous people that will follow them doing the exact same things, and believing that they are making the environment completely different, when in fact they have not changed the space at all.