I appear to have managed neither to publish a reflection nor a tutorial post for this assignment; as I can’t find drafts either, I will try to combine them into this single post, written at the end of the module as I prepare it for assessment.

First though, some context. As I was handing in this assignment, I was also arranging an extension of the deadline for completing my three level one courses in more than the four years allowed. The OCA agreed to this, but any time used for this purpose (I estimated five months) would be subtracted from my level two allocation; there will be no facility to ‘borrow’ time from the level three courses, so I will need to crack on in the autumn to try and make up the time.

Part of the reason for my exceeding the four-year allowance for the level had been small delays in my previous two courses; however I had also pretty much ground to a halt towards the end of 2017, publishing only a handful of posts between September and Christmas. Now, in March, having rejected several ideas for the assignment before settling on this final one, I liked the pictures I had submitted, but mainly I was pleased simply to be getting going again.

With this assignment, my tutor didn’t seem to be having to try quite so hard digging through my pictures to find something he liked to balance criticisms during the tutorial.

‘This is a lot more focused and subject oriented than your last assignment. Immediately that gives the impression of maturity in content and approach. Clearly a ‘window’ perspective on your commuting community.’

The bulk of the tutorial was spent talking about the twenty five pictures (too many – ‘you need to edit more rigorously’) I had submitted on my G:Drive: there were possible redundancies among the three introductory pictures, taken as a Victoria line train slid into Oxford Circus; the first four pictures (of two women, one in a red coat and the other in black) were ‘strong‘ despite pushing the limits of acceptability in terms of focus and grain; the three shots of people looking out of the left of the frame as a train whizzed past them into the station formed ‘another really good series […] probably the best shots here;’ there were good portraits among the swirl of people disembarking and embarking; the last three pictures ‘really do give the impression of thinning platform crowd.‘

The last three pictures had been dropped from the assignment after posting them on my G:Drive and having prints made and sent to Robert, but before the assignment posts themselves had been finalised; I’ll include them here both for completeness and because I like them too:

We talked about how I had gone about taking the pictures and Robert was able to concede that the quality of the images was better in the slide-show version than in the shared folder on my g:drive which had been his main source for the tutorial. Later I checked the settings of my saved lightroom export and discovered I had seriously overdone the jpeg compression of the pictures for this assignment. The problem was not as serious as it first appeared but still could have been bolder with setting high ISOs on my camera. I went on to try this out while taking photographs in similarly gloomy conditions on the underground for assignment five.

But back to March 2018: crisis over, it was time to get on with finishing the last two assignments of the module in time for assessment in November…