Welcome to my Self-Portrait Website

Hello there! My name is Alexander Barnes and welcome to my Self-Portrait website. Here you will learn all about me, my work, and even my family and friends. The whole purpose of this website is for you to discover who I am and how I view myself, so please, take a look around this website and explore!

Making this website was long and tedious, but it has helped grow and reinforce my knowledge in many ways. It has helped to reinforce my knowledge of many programs including Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and Apple's Garage Band, as well as teach me to use new ones such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Kuler, and many small applications. Through Adobe Dreamweaver, I made a basic HTML template to make a design, and used this template to expand and create the other pages. Through Adobe Lightroom, I learned how to create Photogalleries like the one that pops up when you click my button "Photogallery", as well as develop (edit) my images. Through Adobe Photoshop, I created my Personal Poem (below) as well as seperate little projects such as my image above. Using Adobe Illustrator, I made my icons using images and tracing them with a pen tool, as well as my Illustration that you may view if you click on the "Illustration" button. With Apple's Garage Band, I created the audio portions of this website, using loops for the music and an isolation booth and mic for the voice recordings.

For my theme, I have chosen to do a darkroom setting, with trays with developing photos in them as the icons and a repeating pattern of wood going vertically down the center of the screen with "paper" running down the center of that. This is an important theme in my life because I indulge heavily in darkroom photography and is a safe, familiar area to me. I am constantly going out and shooting film and developing it and have an assortment of cameras that I enjoy doing this with. As I mentioned before that my icons were created by tracing images in Adobe Illustrator. The images that appear to be developing are images that were taken by both myself and my friend Ben (refer to "friends" page).

Creating this website was definitely a challenge, but I am extremely proud of it and I have learned valuable lessons from it such as time management and work ethics. I felt that I never really had a clear idea of how I wanted this all to turn out, so at certain times it became stressful, but of course I eventually figured it out otherwise you would not be looking at the same website! It was definitely something that I came out alive and well from, and I am extremely thankful for the oppurtunity and will definitely work harder on my next website.

The Beauty of Film is the Grain

In our English class, we created a poem from one of my 10 personal statements. We took this poem and in WebAudio we created a graphic with Adobe Photoshop. It relates to who I am because it exemplifies my passion of Film Photography.