For the portrait/audio assignment, I chose to explore one of the worlds of art that I had never before had the opportunity to see: glass. I’ve always been curious about Ohio State’s glass program in the Department of Art, and have always thought glass blowing (or any art, really)  seems a fun path to follow, but I could never have the talent. So how many glass blowing majors could there possibly be at OSU? As I suspected – less than 20.

The person I chose to interview is Neil Messinger, a senior in the glass program. He let me photograph him during one of his glass-blowing sessions, and here are some of the results:

When I first walked into N8 studio, the first thing I noticed was the relatively dark lighting, but I played with the lights from the work space and the mirror reflection to my advantage as best as I knew how. I found it interesting to have a light source (the flame of the torch) as a main subject in these images, and tried to avoid any silhouette effects. There were limited angles at which to photograph him, due to the nature of the work in front of him and the structure of the room, but I somehow caught some intriguing and more-than-decent images in the process.

The one below – which I didn’t submit due to poor lighting – is when I finally got the guts to say, “could you take off your sunglasses for this one?”

Capturing my self-portrait was a whole different category of challenges.
A. I don’t see myself as “photogenic” in the slightest (I honestly prefer what I see in the mirror to what I see in photos)
B. My roommate was helping me with the shoot, and I didn’t want to take more than 25 minutes of her time, and
C. I didn’t know how to portray myself, so as you see I randomly chose to spread out some of my published articles from The Lantern and hold my violin in the center of them, shot from a bird’s-eye-view angle :p. I think it does a decent job at conveying my outgoing/random personality and most-prized interests.