Reflection on Ecology Projects

     I think people struggled with the ecology projects. I know I did. After my finished collection of photos were all bundled up neatly on my computer, I noticed the interesting trend; several photos appearing to be from the perspective of an animal, a concept I would someday like to further explore. But there lies the problem; I didn't start out with a particular goal or theme. Granted, I'm so clever I thought of one after the fact, but I noticed a lot of other people didn't. Most of the projects were just pictures of generic nature-esque things; plants, bugs, nature scenes, etc. Even the city scenes were just bland ol' pictures of the city. No one had a goal or concept, for example...

"To inspire sympathy from the viewer by displaying pathetic, trampled, but persevering nature in the urban environment." 

     or even...

"To show the figurative connection between man and nature, by comparing the physical human form to forms found in nature."

     I think this problem came from the fact that we all wanted to go out into nature and start messin around with sticks. Then we hear the part where we have to have 20 pictures, and it throws our game off. This project was unlike the other projects, we weren't just making a piece of art with meaning any more. It had to be at least several pieces of art, and we were limited to photography or photo documentation. The fact that we had limited time meant not many people could find good locations or gather materials, so that aspect basically limited most of us to photography. I just think none of us were in the mind set after the other projects this semester to make correlations on a deeper level of photographs of only things that were already in existence before we started this project.