Final Proposal

Jake Snider

Photo 410

Roman

Final Proposal

For my final proposal, I wanted to focus my photography on motion in board sports.  I grew up participating in almost every type of team sport, but those unfortunately all faded away from my mind extremely quickly. The only sports that I became extremely attached to were skateboarding and snowboarding, both of which have helped to define my character. As my primary passion is of action sports, I have some prior experience capturing shots of athletes in the standard style seen often in magazines. For this project, I wanted to incorporate the same passion and attitude I associate with the sport, but captured in a new light. By using a combination of slow shutter speeds and the movement of both myself and subject matters, I was able to create an array of images that helped to exaggerate motion and enhance the raw power these action sports require. For myself, this project was extremely frustrating, and often times I started to see myself disliking what I was doing more and more. And that is revolved around both photography and the action sports I was photographing, and that frankly sucks. My passion was gone, and I grew tired. I was on the verge of giving up, and for once in my life I had come to terms with that as my resolution. After a heavy discussion and persuasion session with Eric, in a last-ditch effort, I decided to take his advice and let go of any previous notions I had surrounding my proposal, my background, and my ego. The next photo set I tried completely one-off techniques with a very “whatever, I don’t care anymore” type of attitude. It was then, I had a breakthrough. It was then I came to the final realization of where I needed my work to go. And after numerous responses and feedback from those of you in class, a weight was finally lifted off my shoulders, and I found myself happy again. Within the last year I have finally been able to define myself as a photographer, so this project was frustrating for me as I felt it was challenging my technical abilities as well as my spirit. I suavely don’t learn very much technical speaking from photo classes, I use them as an excuse to take pictures more often. But, this class was obviously different. What I’ve learned from this class is sometimes you need to be told things you’d rather not like to hear in order to point yourself in a different direction. I would not have been able to to get this point without the assistance from my professor and classmates. So I’d like to say thank you to everyone. Thank you for not only allowing me the proper atmosphere to further develop my work, but thank you for allowing me to help further develop myself.