Photo Assignment #4 - Taylor McLaughlin

 

On February 23, 2022, I traveled to Washington D.C. with the University of Maryland's Football Team to visit The National Museum of African American History and Culture. I took photos of the players, the location and some of the exhibits that we experienced during the trip. 

In this photo of Durell Nchami, a memer of the team, I captured the shirt he was wearing to visit the museum. I thought the shirt expressed a strong message and Nchami was standing in front of a projector screen, so the light on his shirt created a cool highlighting aspect for the message and colors on his shirt.

 Above are two photos in the museums exhibit that was dedicated to African Americans in sports, titled "Sports: Leveling the Playing Field". I really enjoyed the lighting they had placed on the statues and I brought up my shutter speed and lowered my ISO to mainly capture the nature highlights of the statues' detail and design. I believe this lighting, which my photo shows what it looked like in person, was meant to bring a dramatic element to the meaning of these individuals.

This statue was very visually interesting to me, personally. It was a tree, of sorts, with a lot of colorful glass bottle. The lighting of the sculpture were orange and blue lights, which I captured to show off the beautiful color scheme. 

In this photo, I was trying to capture the beautiful architecture of the building. This is a view coming down from their escalators and I thought it was beautiful how the light was shining through the textured building siding. Here, I brought up my shutter speed because it was very bright light shining through and I wanted to highlight the architecture as the sun was.

In this photo, the room was dark with a soft spotlight on this quote. It is a powerful quote in reference to equality and I think it moved everyone in the room. I brought my shutter speed down, but not so much so that to take away the dramatic element of the spotlight. 

 

There were a lot of powerful quotes throughout the museum and I wanted to capture that. I tried to get shots of our guys as they were looking at the quotes. In the first photo, I brought up my shutter speed and lowered my aperture and ISO to be able to focus on the quote over the shoulder of a player and to silhouette the player to frame the quote. In the second photo, I loved the quote from Martin Luther King Jr. in reference to the fountain. 

I thought this photo was visually interesting because we were inside of the exhibit for the history of African Americans in the NFL. The player in the photo is Ruben Hyppolite II and I captured the photo to highlight the light on the exhibit's wall of photographs behind him.  

At the end of the trip, the sun was starting to set and I thought it was a beautiful silhouette of the National Monument and the flags around it with the subtle, cloudy sunset. I brought my shutter speed way up, made my aperture f10 and lowered my ISO to 320 to capture the true silhouette.