Ashley Batac

  Hey all! Welcome to blog post #4! For this week, I played with framing and hierarchy to bring focus in different ways.  https://www.instagram.com/p/CcxtVg9LKqG5X43hayJD73z65oglpMOm5dbG4k0/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= With these two photos, I experimented with cropping in an unexpected manner. According to Lupton and Phillips, "by closing in on a detail, cropping can change the focus of a picture, giving it new meaning and emphasis" (Lupton and Phillips, 119).  The first photo is the original photo portraying the hidden moon behind the vast sky with fluffy clouds and part of a tree on the lower right hand corner. I used my phone and played with cropping by zooming in on the tree, bringing focus to it and "giving it new meaning." In the second photo, the viewer's perspective is more limited as the photograph portrays only the top part of the tree.  One thing that reminded me of back home in Hawaii were Acai bowls. This week I took a trip to satisfy my craving and played...

  Welcome to blog post #3! When I was younger, I used to grab a box of old photos to take a trip down memory lane and relive past experiences, but now Snapchat and Facebook do that for me. Whether it's grainy filters or automatically generated On This Day photos, media has changed the way I engage with nostalgia. With social media at our fingertips, and the platforms delivering nostalgia, most of us engage with it without intent.  https://instagram.com/p/CcfcsKZL7XxREKFPYfUqoyof-sMwMQumhwIE0o0/ Nostalgia is a unique feeling and one that is quite common. To me, nostalgia is a wistful affection for the past and remembering something with fondness.  Both of these images capture moments of me when I was younger at the beach. The smell of the ocean and the feeling of sand on my feet stir up emotions of relaxation and remind me of home.  In  The Social Photo on Photography and Social Media , Nathan Jurgenson mentions that nostalgia "looks toward what once was, no...

Welcome to blog post #2! For this week, I chose to display images that I took in Hawaii that focus on how I can play with balance and scale in my artwork. https://www.instagram.com/artofashh/ Balance Balance refers to how the elements of art (line, shape, color, value, space, form, texture) relate to each other within the composition in terms of their visual weight to create visual equilibrium. That is, one side does not seem heavier than another. “Visual balance occurs when the weight of one or more things is distributed evenly or proportionately in space (Lupton and Phillips, 49). In this image, the eye-catching feature is the sun being that it is in the center and serves as the focal point. The sky, the ocean, and the sand are distributed evenly across the composition, which provides a sense of stability and makes the viewer feel comfortable. The light shining from the sun is contrasted by the dark clouds and the sun's rays are reflected off of the deep blue waves of the ocean. ...

Hi everyone! My name is Ashley Batac and I am a junior majoring in psychology. I also play for the women's basketball team here. I am excited to be working on this blog and share a little bit of my life through art! I was born on the island of Guam, lived in Hawaii, and grew up in Texas. I am an island girl living in the mainland trying to navigate my way around this world. I want to share my experiences growing up on an island and being able to take in nature's true beauty on a daily basis. Often, when people ask me where I am from and I respond with something along the lines of "Yeah I grew up in Hawaii," people are shocked as to why I would ever want to move anywhere else. People dream about vacationing or possibly retiring at a place like Hawaii, but to say I used to live there is pretty cool.  What does it mean to live on an island? You may recognize the word "ohana" from the movie "Lilo and Stich." The characters repeatedly state that "o...