Making the portfolio of task 3 was quite a lot of work, finishing three experiments and preparing for the pitch did make me feel a bit tired but the result was extremely helpful and useful for my task 4 final project.

I forced myself to notice things around me in experiment-1, because I wanted myself to notice things more naturally. In the first half of the experiment I was very involuntary about noticing. Everyday I needed the alarm to remind myself I’m actually doing an experiment, I need to notice things. Which also explains why there was one day I forgot to set an alarm and did not take a photo or even notice anything. The good thing is we always learn from our false and develop new skills out of it. That mistake helped me a lot during the second half of the experiment, reminded me anymore mistakes will be unacceptable and I need to take things more seriously. This effort helped me to develop the habit of always noticing things around me. The moment I start noticing things automatically is the moment of success for this experiment, because I’m finally starting to notice things naturally, and I’m starting to see things in different perspectives and finding interesting things of objects around me.

The second experiment is where I really started to develop a main direction for the whole task. I made a video based on the theme of “texture you see in your daily life”. I spent a long time looking for objects I use or see very often in my daily life that also has an interesting texture. During the making process I managed to improve the use of focus, lighting and video shooting skills for myself. I made a survey to ask my friends what they think the theme of the video is and how I can improve myself the make the theme clearer to the audience. I received some useful feedbacks like consider the use of background music and make the change of focus slower to show the clear moments longer. From the experiment I learned the points I need to focus on in the future video projects, and I also has a clearer idea about the task 4 project. I would like to do a series of photos focused on texture of things.

The last experiment is an experiment I set for myself to see if experiment-1 really worked and also to develop new ways of noticing. For this experiment I did the very similar thing as experiment-1 but I did not set any alarm or notifications to see what I can notice out of this condition. Just like I expected I still managed to notice a lot of news things, without any notification. This time I mainly focused on textures of metals. I found that you could not only notice things before or during the making process but also notice something that can surprise you when you are reviewing the works. There are a few photos that I noticed even more details after I took the photo. It is another perspective of noticing things, so in the future I can take of photo of something that interests me and maybe notice something else in the photo, then go back and take another photo with a new perspective to see what I can find.

In conclusion, from those three experiments I managed to notice things naturally, learned how to improve my videos for a better presentation of what I’m trying to show, learned new perspectives when I notice something and developed an idea for my task 4 final project. Now when I see something around me, I will look at it in a more detailed way, touch it to see if it has an interesting texture. I will take a photo of things I newly noticed if I found it worth recording. I learned when I make it video I need to use music carefully, think if it really fits the purpose of the video or even make a silent video. I learned I can review my photos and see if I could find something I didn’t notice when I took the photo.

I also have an idea of what I would like to do for my task 4 project. I would like to make a series of photos based on the theme of “finding the beauty in your daily lives.” Many people around me think there is nothing interesting out of ordinary, normal things are always normal and don’t worth a second look. There are also people who think that daily life is too scheduled, everyday feels the same. However I think there are always beautiful and interesting things around us, whenever or wherever we are, we just need to see things in different ways and change our perspective. I want to turn ordinary things into extraordinary photographs. I want to keep look for objects people use in their daily lives and find the cool textures or even some other interesting elements on them.