ISU:
DESTINATION TORONTO
What Makes Toronto Great?
This question is the key to this assignment:
"What makes Toronto great?"
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If you had to answer that question, what would your answer be? Forget the photography for a second. What makes Toronto great? Is it the diversity? The arts? The restaurants? The opportunity? Why do people seek this city out? Why did almost 160,000 people immigrate here last year?
Answer that, and then find the photos to support it.
OVERVIEW
Part 1: select 25 photos from a body of work (minimum 100) that captures the spirit of Toronto. Your final work will be presented on a WIX website.
Part 2: take 5 (additional) photos of a historic building in Toronto
Part 1 | WEBSITE
You will need to create a website using the WIX website builder. You can do this before, after or while taking photos. The website will serve as your final submission. The video at the bottom of this page walks you through the process.
Part 2 | BODY OF WORK
BODY OF WORK
Minimum 100 photos
You must take a minimum of 100 photos for this assignment. All 100 photos must be uploaded to an album in Flickr called ISU: Body of Work
This album must be submitted in the Brightspace assignment dropbox.
Your body of work should include many subjects (e.g. people, architecture, landmarks, parks, culture, etc) and locations (e.g. Harbourfront, Kensington Market, the Financial District, Fort York, etc).
Note 2.1: These photos do not need to be named.
Note 2.2: These photos will make up your Thinking and Inquiry mark
Part 3 | SELECTED WORKS
SUBMISSION
Exactly 25 photos
You will choose 25 photos from your body of work to be uploaded to your website. These photos should illustrate your learning over the course. Your photos will be evaluated based on content, image quality, technical merit, creativity, uniqueness, connection, overall visual appeal and how thoroughly and appropriately you address the question:
What makes Toronto great?'
You must have photos that fall into at least 5 of the following categories:
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architecture
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​parks / nature
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culture
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food
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the Arts
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nightlife
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water
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transit / transportation
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tourism
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sports
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weather
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a large gathering of people
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street life
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fashion
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Requirements:
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Each of your 25 photos must have a name (the name ‘untitled’ may be used for a maximum of 3 photos).
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Your photos should have at least three different date stamps based on the EXIF information displayed by Flickr.
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Your submitted photos should demonstrate a wide array of skills learned in class. (One might demonstrate capturing motion, one might demonstrate long exposure, one might demonstrate depth of field.)
Note 3.2: These photos will make up your Application mark
Part 4 | HISTORICAL TO
Select one of the historical topics below. Read the associated article and plan to take photos of this piece of Toronto on our photowalk. You should take a minimum of 5 photos of your chosen topic. (You may seek out your own topic/building, if preferred)
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Topics:
St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, built 1885 (article)
Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, built 1890 (article)
Kensington Market, established early 1900s
The Occidental Building (The Big Bop), 1876-78 (article)
Trinity College, University of Toronto location, 1925
(More topics TBD)
St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, 130 Bathurst St, built 1885
LAKESHORE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, 17 3155 Lake Shore Blvd W, built 1890
PRESENTATION
Your 25 photos must be uploaded to a WIX website for submission.
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I highly recommend using the template outlined in the video, but you may use any template you want. You must ensure that all 25 photos are easily viewable (in small and large format). You must also answer written work on a page within the site.
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The video below walks you through the entire process.
CHECKLIST
INSPIRATION
DOC
There are a number of places to find inspiration. Here are just a few:
View from the Streets | Toronto Star project
ASSESSMENT
HOW IS IT MARKED?
Review the images and feedback to get a better understanding of what I had to say about submitted work for this submission
This is a wonderful find. How do you apply the rules we have learned to this composition? This is a very centrally composed photo, which cuts off her fingers and foot - not purposely. We learned about intrusions and eliminating distractions. This is where to apply it. How would another angle affect the photo? Can you better incorporate angles to use her dynamic movement the affect the composition? What about the crowd? A low angle could have moved their obscured faces into view, and by moving left you could have included them all, forcing the viewer's eye to follow the eye lines to our focal point. This is good, but could be much stronger with more consideration.
You should be very proud of this work. It is exemplary. Your use of the techniques we learned throughout the course and your experimentation are exactly what I hope to see in an ISU. The photos they lead to are outstanding. You have applied tools from every aspect of this course. 'Frame within a frame' (from open/closed composition), white balance changes for a purpose (white balance task), colour isolation (red balloon task), depth of field, capturing motion, and more. Your selected photos give the viewer a thorough and varied view of the city, through the lens of colour, contrast and unity, which you eloquently write about in your written artist statement. Outstanding.
Overall, you did a good job of finding interesting images and scenes to capture, but some of them need more subject matter. Look at your photo 'Bokeh'. It's a good example of using the technique, but it's not something that would show up in a book about Toronto, because there's nothing specific about 'Toronto' in the image.
...look at 'stairway to heaven'. It's a good photo that uses a lot of the considerations we have talked about: repetition, contrast, capturing motion, leading lines, depth. But look critically at the composition. The brightest element (the red neon Rogers sign) is cut off, leads out of the frame, and doesn't help the actual emphasis of the photo: the stairs.
So; a good photo, but a little critical analysis and thus tighter cropping would make a big difference.
Look at the difference between 'The Coast is Clear' and 'Where to?'. The use of the rule of thirds and the addition of the girl makes all the difference. 'The Coast' also makes really good use of colour temperature differences. The warm vs. the cool colours really enforces the emphasis point. This is an excellent photo. 'Where to?' is fine, but my eye darts around looking for a place to land. I search for the point. I eventually land on the clock, but sort of in disappointment, and keep checking the flags to see if they're more important. By comparison, in 'The Coast' my eye goes right to the girl and stays there.