Week 5 Syntax of VIsual Literacy

Download and post that photo on your blog and underneath post a the first paragraph of text as follows: Write a list of one-word or short-phrased responses you have to it in terms of its literal, representational content as well as its underlying compositional structure and include a list of any symbols (language or other symbols) that can be seen in the image. After this analysis, write a paragraph that completely reports (verbally) what the photograph reports (visually) and which could be used as a REPLACEMENT for it (as if you were describing it to someone who was visually impaired).

Sad, concerned, down, line, unemployed, heads down, frown, depressed, frustration, rain, umbrella, time, depth, long.

Some of the symbols that I notice are as follows:

1) Suit case- This was the first things I noticed in the picture. It represents moving. She is walking with her head slightly down,  almost depressed. Maybe she is walking to the end of the line to join the rest of this group.

2)Umbrellas- It is implying that it is a rainy day, at least a cold one at that. Just the fact that everyone is bundled in clothes and holding umbrellas implies that the weather is not ideal for standing around. Leaving me to believe that they HAVE to be there.

3) Left-over's- What looks to be left-overs that this man is holding, he stands with this deep and discouraged look on his face. His left-over food is representational of saving money or a lack there of.

Starting from the right, we are looking at around 40-50 standing in line, butting up against the backside of some large financial building in, what looks to be, a large city. There are very few facial expressions, but from what is visible, the overall mood is distraught. In the left third of the page, a Caucasian man looking at the ground with an obvious frown. Many of the individuals are wearing coats and holding umbrellas. The people in line are structurally forming an implied diagonal line that has them vanishing away in linear perspective with the rest of the towering financial building to the left and right ow them. To the right of the photograph, A lady, with one hand in her pocket, walks down the sidewalk with her head looking down towards the ground. As if she is joining the end of the line on this cold, windy Chicago style, day.

Week4 Images in Action

I found this exercise to be quite interesting. It was strange for me to reflect on how I think, such an unnatural act. There is what I came up with; my mind had the tendency to search for patterns. How I broke it down was at #1 I started off with the most vertical color. From there I searched for other umbrellas that also had a red top. Once I identified them, in a turned to #2. This is where I looked for the colors positioned vertically in the top left umbrella. I went and matched all, any others, with the same colors in the same place. If there was a match I went to #3. From here I looked for the colors facing horizontally, in the inner portion, of the umbrella. When reading about the "perceptual speed" I found that I took the long route to finding which were the same. I think my mind tended to do this also for the reason that the symmetrical shapes/patterns and it using multiple feature channels, made it difficult for my eye to recognize the common/like umbrellas.

Here is the one that I am going to try to attempt to describe and show what she was thinking. Let me say though, she did start off looking at it in the same manner that I was. It was not working for her and she changer up her strategy because it was taking her to long to identify the matching umbrella. Her whole strategy was based on stepping back and looking at pattern as a whole. in illustration #1 she was just looking at the inner umbrella design and matching up what the design did, for her eye, with all of the other inner umbrella areas. From there illustration #2 is showing that she stepped back even farther and looked at the whole umbrella, as opposed to the inner part. That did not work for her, so She stepped even farther back and looked at all of the designs from a further distance and attempted to locate the common umbrellas from there. She ended up finding the patterns before I did. She was looking for "desired patterns' in the umbrella and trying to match them with others.

Here is exercise #2. Well the way that my mind looked at this was I sectioned off this picture by color. I forgot about the fact that it was a cat and focused on only color. I started off with #1, mainly because it contained more surface area. From there I counted out how many different triangles were had that specific color. I quickly went to color #2 and repeated this momentary rule for myself.  My eyes were using a "color" feature channel to help organize, in my mind,   what I was looking, in order to efficiently count these triangles. I was also using shape, and size's feature channels to help identify how my triangles there were. I find it interesting that my mind is constantly classifying things/objects. 

Here is my attempt to visually show you how my friend approached this challenge. She explained it to me that she started from the top and started scanning downward and counting every triangle that intersects with her visual pathway downward. She started at #1 and made her eyes scan down to number 12. I had a hard time identifying what or how this related to the reading. She was using her visual memory as she scanned down the page vigorously.  It states in our reading that the more "accurately you perceive the design" the better off you will be with remembering it. I believe this helped her as she scanned through. As she finished we found that she was off by 1 triangle.  Due to my longer, more accurate approach, I finished right after her but got the right amount of triangles.  This got me thinking to the correlation between speed vs accuracy. There has to be a link.

Feature Channels

Well, it is quite obvious which feature hierarchy is being used here. One of the most "powerful, which is the use of color. I feel that this is a great example due to the fact that right as the picture appeared on the screen bottom up processing kicked in and had my mind subconsciously was thinking Red is to the right. This info, quickly, transmits to your primary visual cortex What is that. It was an instantaneous movement of my eye directly to discolored apple. I started thinking about how this would look like with different hierarchical feature channels would make this look. Maybe if they were all green, but one was squared off and unoriginal; or something that uses more than one feature channel at a time, For instance, the  combonation of color and shape. 

Week 2 Visual Queries

Zachary Welburn

Lets talk about short fixations. When my eye loos at this color wheel it is drawn all over the place. Many diagonal lines which sways my eye across the page. One thing that this picture might be lacking, that has a lot to do with Top-down visual processing and is quite an important attribute, is goal directed movments. There is no forseen goal in this pciture, therefore my eye is not looking ahead for maximum efficiency.  As my eye saccades throguht the page there are a couple fixation points in which my eyes pause to focus on. These points are where the miniature color wheels overlap with transparency through the larger color wheel. I find my eyes Hovering over areas of text creating scan paths. The last think that I would like to not about this illustration is constant relinking of colors that are complimentary of each other on the color wheel.