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James Devero's Portfolio: Photography I

James Devero — Photography I — Artist’s Statement 

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As a novice photographer, I didn’t really know what I was getting into with this class. I only did a couple gigs prior in high school with a professional camera, in which I had to wing it for special events, and I only took one class before this where I had handled a professional digital camera more extensively, and I never had a camera to even call my own beforehand. 

That said, I was excited to finally learn a whole lot more about the camera, as I am an artist who wants to eagerly learn more about different crafts and mediums, and once I got myself situated, I took to the assignments with great trial and error. With each lesson I had a huge breakthrough about the workings of my Canon Rebel, and used both my own limitations as a beginner and the camera’s advantages to take images with my own intuition and aesthetic taste. 

I have grown up with a love of cartoons and vintage technology, so I wanted to incorporate those into my photography once I got used to the camera. I had a bunch of plastic sheets I drew cartoons on with India ink and acrylic paint, and I photographed those directly over live subjects like household objects and cities. I bought a bunch of color filters and most of my latest work utilized those, taking color photography inspired by old-school techniques mastered by the likes of Technicolor and Paul Outerbridge in the 20th century. With these filters I would take one separate image of the same subject with a different color filter — red, green, and blue — to create color separations which I would combine in an image editing program to generate a richly-colored, if not completely faithful, image. 

This class helped me to develop what I loved about photography and learn a bunch of new tricks, and I firmly believe a skill like this will help boost the rest of my artistic output.