Category Archives: ASSIGNMENTS

Assignment 5 – Ideas & Initial Research

barcelona teleferique – 13/04/2014

For this last assignment, I arranged a phone tutorial at the end of April to go through the ideas I had for narratives In preparation I sent him a quick summary of the 4 ideas I wanted to examine: they covered a reasonable spectrum of stories and possible treatments ranging from total control through to recording an event.

Idea 1: Alice – Birth to 2 year-old in Clothes

My daughter is newly two, and we still have not got round to passing on the clothes she no longer fits.

I quite fancy the idea of doing something that shows what she would have worn typically (with increases in size) at 3 months intervals.

There would be body suits, sleep suits, shoes, trousers, coats etc etc to document into some sort of typology. Also, plenty of colour, opportunities for framing to get some idea of growth over 3 otherwise identical tops say etc etc

Idea 2: Crosswords

Taking 3 of the different sorts of clues (anagrams, read throughs and conventional codes for example) and illustrating them with one day’s crossword as it is solved and filled in.

Opportunity for a nice wide cover shot; opportunities for time to be indicated in various ways like changing light through the window, the crossword being filled in, coffee rings on the paper etc etc as a lazy day off is spent doing the puzzle.

Idea 3: Why is Elmfield Road in Walthamstow an incomplete terrace?

Because there’s a small range of 50’s houses in the middle; because a bomb was dropped sometime in late 1940/early 1941…

A mixture of constructed shots:

a silhouetted bomber over Walthamstow at night say;

details of the bomb damage maps held in the Waltham Forest Archive

And more documentary stuff:

the Heinkel bomber at Duxford

Elmfield Road (good for this as it’s one-sided allowing you to get far enough back for a wide shot)

Possible other missing-tooth bombsites in the area

Idea 4 – A trip over the Thames in the Cable Car from Canning Town to the 02

Queuing

Getting In

The people you share the gondola with

The view.

Exterior shots of the ride (near/far)

Stuff like that – giving a simple journey narrative thing, probably taking two journeys to get all the pictures.

Also maybe include some pictures of the Olympic Teleferique in Barcelona, that I took a week ago (and got the idea for this from) but which don’t add up to a full narrative.

The tutorial passed over ideas one and two to concentrate on either the bombed terrace or the cable car. The crossword idea is technical and safe, consisting of a series of constructed shots; Alice’s clothes could look like a series of catalogue shots and again would equal a good commercial photographic commission rather than something to stretch myself (although I’d still like to do this as a personal project – I think it could be a lot more interesting than the outline above suggests).

David made the point that this stage in the Photography BA is a good one to take risks with as the only pressure to get marks is the need to get 40% or over, allowing you to move onto the next module. Working on from this he pushed the second two ideas in a more experimental direction than I had been considering up to that point.

For the cable car idea, I had been thinking along simple “journey as narrative” ideas, done with a mixture of of 1st person POV stuff, taking in waiting to get on, crossing the Thames and then getting out at the other side and 3rd person shots of the cable car, the gondolas and the wires overhead. They would not have been radically different from the Barcelona pictures, but would be more comprehensive than those I’d managed to take over the course of a single one way journey with only one, 12-exposure roll of film in a 50 year old folding camera after the last battery died in my digital (one of which is the header for this post). Instead, David suggested a series of pictures taken from a static point of view looking out from the moving gondola. An interesting idea, but not one that jumped out immediately as the one to do.

But then, for the filled in blitz-gap in the middle of a row of terraced houses, David’s idea clicked instantly! He suggested doing something along the lines of Steffi Klenz’s Nummianus, a piece I was familiar with from Fox and Caruana’s Behind the Image, where three of the pictures are used across pages 12 & 13 to illustrate the idea of choosing a title to add meaning to a body of work. While following this approach would move away from the magazine article part of the assignment, arranging pictures in a printable sequence would still be possible (I think I will produce a postcard-sized concertina-type book which would be capable of being displayed as a free-standing sequence on a shelf or of being fully opened out and pinned to a wall.

Excited, I moved onto more detailed research and planning…

References:

Behind the Image – Anna Fox and Natasha Caruana (AVA publishing SA, 2012)

Nummianus – http://www.steffiklenz.co.uk/work/nummianus/?lang=en (link accessed 17/06/2015)

Assignment # 4 – Tutor’s Comments

Assignment 4 – further reading; stems, weeds and studies

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In the tutor’s feedback for assignment 4, I was pointed in the direction of Lee Friedlander’s Stems and also to a wider list of other photographers’ work dealing with the flowers and the way you can light them, in a variety of ways. I was aware of some them already, others were completely new to me.

Two modern Americans, with contrasting approaches to flower pictures:

Friedlander’s Stems: I’ve known about Friedlander for a while now and have the catalogue from the 2008 MOMA retrospective. While the catalogue contains a number of the Stems pictures, I hadn’t consciously spent time looking at them, paying more attention to the exterior shots earlier on in the book (and Friedlanders chronology). However the similarities between 2 and 5 in my set and the pictures here, suggest that – at some level at least – they had penetrated my consciousness.

They don’t deal with the flower heads, but instead play with the transparency of glass vases, the distortion created by water and the structure and shape of a bunch of stems and leaves. They take something commonly regarded as an aesthetic cliche (flowers) and then ignore the obvious to find further ideas of beauty in the bits that most people pass over. This oblique view of the subject is further emphasised by being in black and white, removing colour from the equation as well. It’s not for nothing that the Russian for “flowers” is the same as the word for “colours” and its absence turns the subject into something else entirely.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Flowers Portfolio (1978 – 1989): In contrast these seem very classical in their concentration on individual named types of bloom, either in black and white or colour. They are crisp enough to be scientific illustrations, and – unlike Friedlander’s pictures – are titled according to the flower name. I really like the contrast between the flatness of the backgrounds and the heightened form of the foregrounded flower heads. Orchids, 1989 (one of the coloured pictures) could almost be a watercolour; Poppy, 1988 captures beautifully the hairy texture of the flowers’ stems, the red of the petals again seems exact. Lovely!

3 photographers producing images that could be described as typographic:

Charles Jones (c. 1900 and rediscovered in 1981): Peas, Carrots, Sprouts, Roses, Marrows, more Roses, more Peas, Strawberries; all set out like illustrations in a seed catalogue. All slightly rougher and less perfect than the fruit and veg you get in a supermarket. The text with the pictures linked above describes them as “portraits” and, like with portraits, there are things that give them away as products of a particular time; for example, the variations of grey that depict the red of the strawberries or the green of the pea pods seem slightly “off” in a way that presumably comes from the non-panchromatic way the chemistry of Jones’ plates reproduced colours as greys.

Karl Blossfeld’s Urformen der Kunst (1928): ‘Urformen’ translates from German as ‘Archetypes’ and these pictures seem very much an attempt to set down the underlying structure of the plants photographed by Blossfeld in a way that relates them directly to elements of design used by humans for either aesthetic or engineering purposes. There is no drama in the uncontrasty lighting here; no strong shadows and no dazzling highlights.

My favourite of the three linked above is Laserpitium Siler, (Laserwort, Part of a Fruit Umbel) with the starry umbels illuminated with their supports darker and in soft focus behind, reminding me of the yellow stars painted on the mid blue ceilings of the tombs in the valley of the kings.

Garry Fabian Miller: I looked at his pictures of Honesty Seed Pods and Bramble Crosses. If I hadn’t read the text, I wouldn’t have picked up on the religious subtext that surrounds these images (although ‘Crosses’ in the title of pictures made at Easter, should have alerted me, I think) leaving me to think about the way they work with repetition of form and variations of colour within depictions of the same thing. Unlike the pictures by Jones and Blossfeld, I don’t see anything that places them in time but – given that they were all made within the last 10 years – the time-specific signifiers probably haven’t started to become obvious yet…

All three sets of pictures looked at here take the plants and flowers pictured out of any sort of historical context, presenting them instead as exemplars of their type, showing details of structure in a scientific, detached way. It is possible to date the pictures however and to place them within the development of photography from technical characteristics of the prints such as the way colours are reproduced (or converted to greys); Jones’ pictures of vegetables or flowers could probably be placed within the context of the cultivation of different types by market gardeners too – they’re not as much a give away of a subjects location within time as clothes on photographs of people would be, but to my relatively ignorant eye, his carrots and marrow don’t look like their 21st century equivalent…

3 photographers whose pictures of flowers seem more concerned with the conditions where the flowers grow than with the flowers per se:

Chris Shaw – Weeds of Wallasey (2007-2012): Purposefully rough pictures printed in a messy high contrast style (“creating an aesthetic of bad printing” is the way Shaw puts it in the video made by Tate Britain to tie in with a show that paired him with Daido Morayama). Centred, foreground objects are overlit by explosions of flash; the edge beyond the exposed area of the film is left in; there are stains and imperfections everywhere; and there are also hand-written humorous titles (I particularly like “The Haywain” where you struggle to link the view of a bus stop with one pane of glass shattered into a drift of ice, in front of a box bridge receding into a fog that is either real or a flaw in the exposure of the print with the picture by Constable, but somehow still end up accepting them both as encapsulations of a certain type of ‘England’). Shaw has written that “Weeds are us” which I take to mean that we are the things that spring up between the cracks in the post-industrial world. As someone with two grandfathers who made a living from ships and the Mersey and who grew up in a house called Bidston, I feel a connection with this series, even if my father managed to think his way out of that particular ghetto.

I’d already linked his pictures with Morayama, before I saw the Tate video by the way; I’m not sure why I feel the need to type that, but for some reason (and I suspect my smartarse motives here) I do…

David Axelbank’s Still Life: harsh, high contrast single flash, outdoors at night, giving extremely vivid, coloured flowers against an inky black background. They’re not unlike Terry Richardson’s fashion stuff in their harshness, or possibly even surveillance pictures; I found myself thinking of the Japanese bloke who took pictures of people having sex in parks in Tokyo or Weegee taking photographs of couples on the beach at Coney Island or snogging in the pictures. Some of them (the ones of round puffy blue flowers, say) could be taken deep underwater or of tiny things viewed through a microscope; they are photos taken somewhere we don’t belong (night) and of things that we don’t normally see.

Julian Anderson, Cinder Path (2009): 6 centrally placed flowers lit within a square frame with a sense of the much darker surroundings not enclosed within the depth of field. Another set that dares to be ugly, eschewing conventional ideas of “prettiness”.

Where the typography pictures aspire to some sort of perfect reproduction of their subject, these images all revel in their imperfections; smudges greyness, text from outside the boundaries of the frame. The making of the pictures and the photographer making them is as important here as the subjects; the flowers provide a pretext for photography, standing in for something larger, odder, more significant perhaps.

If the typographies have more in common with the Mapplethorpe pictures, these all share something with the tensions between order and chaos between the conventional and the individual in Friedlanders’ Stems. It’s also, I think significant that the type of plant is not of significance here; rather the place or the time when they were taken seems to be of greater significance. We have moved from depiction to an interpretable meaning here…

So, how do I relate these to the pictures I made for assignment 4? Some relate directly – Stems match up with Fig, 2 and Fig. 5; I can see a link between Axelrod’s flowers at night and the last of my pictures where everything is made strange by the mixed light from dawn outside and the interior tungsten filtered flash; the second texture picture (Fig. 6) fits in with both the typographies and with Mapplethorpe’s pictures. All of mine could be pushed further I think, but that wasn’t what I was asked to do; I was trying to play with lighting.

References (all accessed 06-vi-15):

David Axelbank (Still Lives) – http://www.davidaxelbank.com/
Robert Mapplethorpe – http://www.mapplethorpe.org/portfolios/flowers/
Lee Friedlander’s Stems – http://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/stems
Karl Blossfeldt –
- http://www.artnet.com/artists/karl-blossfeldt/
- http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/karl-blossfeldt/
Charles Jones – http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/50-charles-jones/overview/
Garry Fabian Miller – http://www.garryfabianmiller.com/
Julian Anderson’s beach Flowers – http://www.juliananderson.co.uk/projects/cinder-path/
Chris Shaw’s Weeds of Wallasey –
- http://chrisshaw.carbonmade.com/projects/4295217#1
- http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-chris-shaw
Erik Niedling – Formation (scroll down to 2007) http://erikniedling.com/search/photographs

assignment 4 – light

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“For this assignment you will draw together the different lighting techniques you have been studying and apply them to one object. The idea is to use your new knowledge of lighting to bring out particular physical properties of the same object. It is also a test of your observation. Choose any subject that you can move around and take 8 photos based on the 4 themes of the assignment. At the core of this assignment you should aim to show the following qualities (Shape, Form, Texture & Colour) of your subject, one at a time, by means of the lighting.” – AoP Coursebook

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All pictures were taken using a Nikon D50 with the ISO set to 200.

1: Shape – This quality has to do with the outline of an object – its edges. These are likely to stand out more clearly if they contrast with the background, and if there is minimum detail visible in the object.

Fig 1 – Shape – Available Light

i – Late afternoon sunlight from behind, diffused by curtains; no fill. Long focal length (112mm/168mm 35mm equivalent) to flatten image somewhat, with camera approximately 4 metres from subject and the flowers 1.5 metres from the background; wide aperture was used to help separate subject from background by reducing the depth of field. Colour original very yellow due to low angle of sun and the oatmeal material of the curtains – when it was converted to B&W, I increased red/orange/yellow in the mix while reducing blue/green in order to lighten background while further darkening the silhouetted jug of carnations.

Fig 2: Shape – Photographic Light

ii – Bright Field Lighting (Hunter, Biver, Fuqua – Light, Science and Magic – Chapter 7) using a light box, fairly close to the rear of the subject; no fill. I used the zoom lens to keep edges of the light box at the edges of theframe in order to achieve the black outline of the jug and it’s handle through the creation of internal reflections. The image was then cropped so the subject filled the frame. With the camera positioned close to the lens’ minimum focus distance, sufficient depth of field to keep the whole bunch of flowers sharp was achieved with a small aperture (f16) and a relatively long exposure of 1/15″ to correctly expose using the relatively weak artificial light source. I did not convert this to B&W as I rather like the almost pen-and-ink-on-parchment feel of it, and the slight hint of magenta flowers coming through.

2: Form – This is another way of describing the volume of an object – how 3 dimensional it looks. The modelling effect of the light and the way you deal with the shadows is all important. Try to show as much depth as possible in the subject.

Fig 3: Form – Available Light

iii – Late afternoon sunlight (about 40 minutes after fig 1) through window on the left of the frame. This contrasty low angled side light was softened slightly by sticking a sheet of grease-proof paper onto the window, but no attempt was made to reflect light back from the right to soften the shadows, emphasizing the 3-dimensional nature of the subject. The low sunlight did not directly strike the background, resulting in it being underexposed and so, I hope, further separating the lit subject from the background, again adding emphasis to its form. Depth of focus was boosted by setting the aperture to f9 and by using a shorter focal length than the more flattened picture in Figure 1. This picture was one of ones taken earlier during the exercise, so the flowers are less open, leading to them having less form to define.

Fig 4: Form – Photographic Light

vi – The subject was placed on a strip of black velvet which was then taped to the wall about a metre behind the jug and flowers. The key light was a Nikon SB-27 Speedlight firing through a white umbrella above and to right of the subject; a silver reflector was then positioned to the left to create the shape-defining band of reflection in the glass jug and also to stop the unlit side of the subject vanishing into the black of the background. Again, the aperture of the lens (a 35mm prime) was shut down to f11 to keep as much of the subject in focus as possible, but this time, due to the brief duration of the strong light from the flash, the shutter speed was able to be a fast 1/400″ rather than the 1/15″ used in fig. 3.

3: Texture – This is a quality of the surface detail. Fine detail, such as that on sandstone or skin, stands out best with a pattern of small, hard shadows, so you will have to consider both the diffusion (or lack of it) and the angle of the light. Of course, a shiny surface like chrome, although it is thought of as being smooth, also has a texture of a kind.

Fig 5: Texture – available light

v – Undiffused late afternoon sun shining through the jug, creating reflection on the surface of bubbles in the water which had collected on the inside of the jug the flowers were standing in. The lens used was a Micro Nikkor 55mm 1:3.5 prime macro lens shut down to f16 with an exposure of 1/8″. The picture has been rotated 90 degrees from landscape to portrait to match the others in the assignment.

Fig 6: Texture – Improvised Light

vi – Improvised using a Mini Maglite pen torch with the beam focussed on the carnation to the left of frame and a kitchen foil reflector to the right to reduce contrast in image. 55mm micro nikkor 1:3.5, f16, 2″. The length of exposure – intended to compensate for the low light output of the maglite and the small aperture used to create enough depth of field for the picture to be about the texture – inadvertently smoothed out the effect of my hand trembling as I held the foil reflector in position giving a more softened edge to the reflected fill.

4: Colour – Choose a kind of lighting and exposure setting that shows the subject’s colour (or colours) as strongly as possible. In addition, you could photograph your subject in any other interesting, unusual or attractive lighting.

Fig 7: Colour – Photographic Light

vii – Nikon Speedlight through umbrella to rear and above subject. Lens was a Nikor AF-D 35mm 1:2 at f4; exposure of 1/500″ to restrict the light to that provided by the strobe. The pale blue of a background (a bed-sheet) was chosen to sit in the spectrum between the magenta of the flowerheads and the green of the stems; the magenta was further highlighted by slightly underexposing the image as covered in part 3 of the course. White balance was set to Flash in the camera and did not require any correction later.

Fig 8: Colour – mixed light

viii – Mixed light from a Nikon Speedlight with a cheap, “gold” (nearly tungsten, but not quite) Flash Bounce Diffuser restricted by long black-wrap snoot to only illuminate the flower heads acting as the key; fill provided by very early morning daylight on a cloudy day through west facing window in shot to left of camera. Lens was a Nikor AF-D 35mm 1:2 at f6.3 with an exposure of 1/3″ to allow the blue fill to burn in after the initial brief punch of coloured light from the flash. The camera’s white balance set to tungsten, but adjusted slightly in Lightroom to give a less blue cast to the entire picture as the original effect was overly lurid, resembling 1930’s technicolour a bit more than I wished.

Assignment 4 – Getting There

assignment # 3 – tutor’s comments & re-edited set

assignment # 3 – colour: pictures and commentry

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Take about sixteen photographs:

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…that illustrate the following colour relationships:

1: Colour Harmony through Complementary Colours

: fig 1: orange & blue – glasgow

: fig 1a: movement

: fig 1b: accentuated colour

I spotted the building while I was walking from the subway on my way to a meeting at Pacific Quay. On my way back, I had enough time to loiter, waiting for people to walk by in both directions. The pale orange of the brick is matched by the reddish orange of the trim to the gable and the door and contrasts nicely with the pale autumn blue of the sky to the north; I like the tiny bits of colour reflected in the gutter. A very flat image (with flat lighting – it was taken at noon) with a lot of horizontal lines running through it: the kerb, the line in the middle of the road and the bottom of the building wall; the diagonals of the gable add interest. The eye moves between the two points made by the door and the walking man (who is surprisingly close to the wall, if you look closely).

: fig 2: orange & blue (+ red + green) – london

: fig 2a: movement

: fig 2b: accentuated colour

The orange and blue of the sign stands out strongly here and there’s lots more of both colours in the traffic and the pedestrians who occupy the space round it. Your eye moves then to the green and red barriers that enlose the sign, making an inverted vanishing point in the centre bottom of the image, with the red also turning up as highlights in the fragments of distant buses on the road and reflected in the plate glass of the window on the right.

: fig 3: orange & blue (+ yellow + violet) – london

: fig 3a: movement + structure

: fig 3b: accentuated colour

An astonishing corner on the Lea Bridge Road, composed as four quadrilaterals united by the sense of movement provided by the striding man in the jersey that managed to be a gloriously matching blue to the door. There’s a minor violet and yellow thing going on in the upper right quarter as well. There is an interesting absence of any scale to the various bits of the building too.

: fig 4: orange and blue – london

: fig 4a: structure

: fig 4b: accentuated colour

Essentially a diagonal band of orange, a diagonal band of blue and a second diagonal band of orange, with your eye drawn to super-bright highlight of the central streetlight, which is casting all the yellowy-orange glare in the street. I’ve been walking on my way home from the tube at dusk a lot these past few weeks, and this is probably the best representation of it that I’ve managed to take.

2: Colour Harmony through Similar Colours

: fig 5: yellow + orange – glasgow

: fig 5a: compostion and movement

: fig 5b: accentuated colour

Lots of lines pointing in towards a vanishing point on the platform, held together by the overall warmth of the colours in the station. The lightness of the yellow contrasts to the dark orange-brown of the tiles where the stair dips down to the platform while the brigthness of the orange (sort of) cross formed by the sign, its reflections and the train give a focus and depth to the picture.

: fig 6: red & violet – london

: fig 6a: compostion and movement

: fig 6b: accentuated colour

Reflections after rain stop this being boring, while a walking man (central and pulling the attention in from the edges of the frame) gives the composition focus and a point of balance. The violets in the this are very cold somehow, with the reds providing no sense of warmth.

: fig 7: red & yellow (+ violet) – london

: fig 7a: movement

: ig 7b: accentuated colour

Despite the sense of forward movement into the space between the nearer two buses here nothing was moving (possibly a faster shutter speed might have spoiled this while sorting out the slight sense of softness across the image) and I was safely stood on a crossing in the middle of Walthamstow Bus Station. Again, there is something quite cold about the image, despite the warmth of the colours.

: fig 8: yellow & red – glasgow

: fig 8a composition and movement

: ig 8b: accentuated colour

More streetlight, mostly a rather bilious yellow provides an out-of-focus backdrop for the leaning sign. Despite the possible depth off to the left and the right, a rather flat image.

3: Colour Contrast through Contrasting Colours

: fig 9: red & blue – london

: fig 9a: compositon

: fig 9b: accentuated colour

Red and blue fighting one another with the orange relating to both (opposite to blue and comfortably similar to red) and so making it less uncomfortable somehow. compositionally arranged around the triangle betwen the seats occupied by the man and his rucksack.

: fig 10: yellow & blue – london

: fig 10a: composition and movement

: fig 10b: accentuated colour

A striking yellow gable end with the shadow of a perpendicular row of houses cast on it by the late afternoon sun. The blue of the eastern sky contrasts with the yellow strongly.

: fig 11: yellow & blue – london

: fig 11a: compositon

: fig 11b: accentuated colour

Nice shapes at the entrance to work. For some reason on the day I took it, I was able to notice the strong contrast between the yellow of the artificial light inside and blue light coming in from the windows to the west. Compositionally a mass of quadrilaterals, capable of further abstraction.

: fig 12: red & blue – london

: fig 12a: composition and movement

: fig 12b: accentuated colour

An objet trouve. A strong colour contrast between the red of the flowers and the blue of the rubbish sack and the lighter emphasises the softness of the abandoned roses and the hardness of the plastic; the light green of the leaves’ underside contrasts with the red of the flowers while stopping the blue jarring as much as it might. The lines between paving slabs and the stems of the roses adds a sense of movement through the frame.

4: Colour Accent using any of the above

: fig 13: orange accent – london

: fig 13a: composition and movement

: fig 13b: accentuated colour

A very centralised composition with the cyclist frozen within a a central diamond formed by the cars’ slanting windscreens, the roofs and the tree. An obvious orange point amongst the blues and greens of the foliage and the sky’s reflections on the shiny surfaces of the cars.

: fig 14: orange accent – london

: fig 14a: composition and movement

: fig 14b: accentuated colour

Taken through a 1 inch square mesh, covering a window on the hoarding that surrounds this building site, hence the vignetting at the bottom of the image. I got the lens in a better place for this with a second shot, but the man’s legs were no longer in a perfect inverted ‘V’… The picture is further held together by two triangles (or one quadrilateral) formed by the man and the two orange-red bands above him on the building and the orange net at the bottom left.

: fig 15: red highlight – glasgow

: fig 15a: composition and accent

: fig 15b: accentuated colour

If William Eggleston can do pictures with their composition based on the confederate flag, I can take a picture composed like a saltire. Particularly when I’m in Glasgow. The greenish-blue of the building, the sky and its reflection in the puddles along with the green of the leaves contrast strongly with the red of the no entry sign.

: fig 16: red highlight – london

: fig 16a: compositon and eyelines

: fig 16b: accentuated colour

The sight-lines of the woman at the bottom left and the man taking up the whole of the right side of the frame all point in towards the woman in the red coat, with the colour hopefully stopping the tall man in the hat being the sole focus of the picture.

All pictures taken with a Fujifilm X-100s apart from Fig 3 which was taken with my Nikon D50 and a Nikkor 24mm 1:28 lens. All editing on the main images done in Adobe Lightroom 5.

More general thoughts on these pictures and how they relate to my reading will be contained in the next post.

Assignment 3 – Getting There…

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For some reason, I’ve found part 3 amazingly difficult. If part two fell into shape around my day on Flotta, this all felt remarkably unfocussed somehow. I was taking pictures – some for the exercises; some which could be considered for the assignment – but none of this seemed to cohere into a theme or to even to start showing the way towards one.

I have now got the pictures for the exercises, I think, but I still need to make a final selection and write them up. I have a set of photographs edited and printed for the assignment. Yet somehow it all feels a bit wooly. However, I think if I press on and do the writing, submit the assignment and write up the exercises, start on part four and carry on reading and thinking, it may all become a bit plainer. An optimistic reading would be that any sort of learning involves stepping into areas of uncertainty and that the way I feel about this now is simply a sign of progression. I shall therefore try to be optimistic and assume that I am still progressing…

Anyway, buoyed up by David, my tutor’s, feedback on my second assignment, I cracked on with part three. I’d generally felt comfortable with colour, and there weren’t many exercises. Surely this should be relativeIy straightforward. So, I quickly took the pictures for Exercise 1 and began to build up a selection of dominant colour pictures for Exercise 2. I began seeing things which would possibly work as part of the assignment and started to take pictures.

At this point, I started trying to reconcile the course notes’ instruction to:

Try to vary the subject matter, including both arrangements (such as a still-life) and found situations.

with my desire to try and develop a coherent theme for this exercise. Not easy.

I came up with 4 subsets for the pictures I would take: at night; on public transport; Walthamstow; fruit and veg as still lives. It almost came together…

: Transport – Green and Red

: Night – Red, Yellow and Blue

: Fruit and Veg – Yellow and Orange

: Walthamstow – Red and Green

But then I had a weekend in Glasgow and managed to take some pictures that seemed better than the ones I’d taken previously but they didn’t fit into the categories; and I hadn’t managed to set up and take the still lives, despite spending a long time in the greengrocery aisle in Sainsbury’s wondering about colour rather than recipes; and certain colours and combinations of colours were proving easy to find (it’s amazing how much orange and blue there is out there) while others were really quite elusive.

At this point, I sort of ground to a halt in terms of completing the assignment, although I continued taking pictures. Some things though began to stand out.

Orange rainwear/hi-viz bibs make a good highlight:

It’s relatively hard (but not impossible) to isolate natural colours, if you’re in a city:

It’s even harder to narrow down the number of colours that are in the frame into something you can classify in the terms of the assignment:

I also began to realise that something was altering the way I took pictures in London. In Orkney, on holiday, I’d been comfortable with the location; Assignment 2 bears this out. London, on the other hand, is a place I haven’t quite worked out how to photograph yet. This may be changing. Certainly, I hope it is.

Orkney has occupied enough of my head – there are views that are burnt onto the inside of my skull somehow, like the stretch of hills beyond Finstown when you round the shoulder of Wideford hill on the road to Stromness. I am aware of how much sky there is above me. I “know” what it is I’m looking at.

I don’t think I have ever quite reached this point in the 17 years I’ve lived in London (I’m not sure if I managed it in Glasgow either). However, this may be changing: the pictures I’m taking now in London are less tightly composed; there is more context around the isolated detail I might have been content with earlier; I’m possibly more comfortable with finding a composition that suggests what lies outside it than I was before. All this is progress.

And so, for the assignment, I think the unifying theme can be no more narrow than “In passing” or “This is what I see, when I think about colour around me”. The things I’ve been reading or looking at are changing what I notice and how I process that. I’ve come up with 16 pictures for the assignment and they may not be perfect; they work however, and I like them all to a varying degree (some are really super, I think). Anyway, time to offer up a final sixteen. Time to move onto the next part of the course…

assignment # 2 – reflections and tutor’s comments

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Rather quickly compared to last time – less than a week - I got the feedback report from my tutor; as a result, I hadn’t managed to put finger to keypad to do my own reflection piece on the assignment. So, here I’ll try and combine the two a bit, but mainly go with the stuff David wrote and my responses to it. To start with however, I think some gentle general self-criticism might be in order.

So: the idea of limiting what I could shoot (and eliminating any idea of a reshoot) by going to a small island for a day worked rather well as a discipline. I had done research in the sense that I both knew what wartime installations in Orkney looked like and had read up on what I would be able to find on Flotta. I hadn’t spent any time on that island, but I knew what Orkney looked like and so wasn’t taking facile, “first look” pictures and knew what to avoid (big flat blown skies and flat landscapes with nothing to stop your eye sliding in one side and straight out the other). In terms of pacing myself I could probably have been a bit more energetic and a bit less dawdly as I started out, as it took me from 9 until lunch at nearly two to reach the furthest point of my walk at Stangar Head. Once there, I hurriedly took 2: two points, 5: distinct shapes # 1 and 14: pattern in a bit of a rush while shoving sandwiches into my mouth and slurping down coffee from a Thermos. At the same time, I managed to calculate how quickly I’d have to move on the way back to catch the ferry. There are 14 pictures in my submission for the assignment and only two were taken after lunch; probably I could have done more, and maybe come up with alternatives for some of the less successful earlier pictures if I hadn’t been rushing along through the rain that had started to fall.

1: garrison cinema – flotta

2: airstrip – flotta

Certainly, I hope I would have noticed the blob of rain on the lens that meant there was a soft spot on several of the pictures I took on the way; I might even have been able to do justice to the airstrip and the garrison theatre.

I like the pictures included in the final selection, particularly the ones of wartime structures, where I think I have come to a conscious understanding of how shooting out from the landward side gives an underlying sense of their purpose of observation and defence which is not there if you position yourself on the shoreside of them looking inland. I’ll play with this some more next time I’m up in Orkney I think. Some of them are weaker than the rest 2: two points is soft (something gone into by Dave in his tutor’s report and which I’ll talk about more fully in a later post about what I think I am doing with equipment during this course - once it’s written, I’ll turn this into a link…); 4: several points is a bit lacklustre really; 14: pattern is just a bit too obvious but generally I’m happier with this set than I was with the contrasted pairs of Assignment 1.

Dave’s overall view was very encouraging too “Well done! […] this was an accomplished assignment and you have made some really interesting pictures going on to highlight 5 of the pictures which “work for me because they are visually well composed as well as having a subject matter that begs questions –what is this place, and what happened here? The sea is obviously important and the lighting suits the subjects well” and he also appreciated the fact I’d had prints made.

Where he was less pleased with the pictures, his criticisms made sense: there were a number that he felt were too tightly framed the diagonals of the playpark and the third shapes picture although he was charitable enough to ascribe this to the need to follow the constraints of the exercise, rather than my laziness in not walking half a dozen paces further back and jumping over a fence! I also suspect that part of the reason for overly tight framing could be down to my rarely looking at my pictures any larger than 6 x 4 inches and making a lot of judgements while shooting based on the small viewfinder image and the equally small screen on my D50 a bonus of getting decent sized prints made is possibly that I will start to be less concerned about something not being “there” in the picture as it is too small to stand out. We’ll see…

Dave also felt that the first implied triangle picture didn’t match the other pictures in the set due to the wildly differenct perspective created by both the lens and the way it was angled down at the foreground. I can see this and am happy to replace it with his suggested alternative:

“The triangle could be in the posts, the grass or the tarmac and it fits well with the cool, grey aesthetic that runs through the images whilst adding something new to the series” – Dave Wyatt

This isn’t a picture I took as part of the assignment; rather it was a diary-type shot taken as I got off the ferry, to show where I was. As a result, I never considered it for inclusion here, but realise now that - as well as Dave’s comment above - it adds a further layer to the view of the economic history of the island contained in the set: other pictures show farming (now pretty much defunct), the fleet base at Scapa Flow, renewable energy elements and – in 13: rhythm - a retired couple’s washing, hinting at the ageing resident population; I’d been slightly annoyed that I hadn’t been able to get anything of the oil terminal into the set and this achieves that in a simple and obvious way. I will get a copy printed up at the same time as I get the prints made for assignment 3…

assignment # 2 – elements of design: pictures + commentry

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Produce 10-15 photographs, all of a similar subject…

Flotta – Friday 1st August 2014

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…between them they will show the following effects:

1: single point dominating the compostion

1: A Single Point

I thought long and hard about using one of the shots of the wind turbine, with its nacelle as the point, but in the end decided that a: the square view through the window and the doorway of this small brick hut (a sentry hut?) was “pointy” enough and b: that this was a much stronger photo than any of the turbine pictures. I particularly like the way moving your eyes over its surface generates a strong sense of refocussing (as discussed in part 4 of Shore’s The Nature of Photographs) and the way the various horizontal and vertical lines in the picture reinforce the idea of the frame. The point possibly becomes a punctum, leaving us with a picture about pictures hung on (or here, in) a wall, with the almost central positioning of the point achieving a sense of uneasy stillness which works nicely with the flatness of the view.

2: two points

2: Two Points

Two water tower supports, out towards Stangar Head. I think these qualify as points because of the way the crumbling concrete contrasts with the softness of the land and the lack of any obvious focal point out towards the horizon. This is probably a bit soft, when viewed at print size, a warning not to use a heavy 35-70mm zoom handheld with a shutter speed of 1/80th sec. The framing of this is key: I spent a reasonable amount of time with the camera, judging how close to the edge the two structures needed to be to achieve some sense of balance; I then carried on this process cropping a bit more off the the sides and bottom of the image in Lightroom. I hope your eyes travel along the horizon from the larger tower to the smaller one, and then back again…

a combination of vertical and horizontal lines

3: Vertical and Horizontal Lines

A natural triptych which – like 1 – creates a very strong sense of planes. Taken inside a searchlight emplacement (the light would have split into 3 strong beams as it passed through the vertical slits) I used the camera’s flash throttled back to minimum intensity to get some sense of texture on the inside wall helped by the black staining, which is presumably carbon deposited by the arc-ing rods that made the beam of the searchlight. It was hard getting the colour temperature right here, something that wasn’t made easier by the chromatic aberration visible down the verticals of the slits, that I only noticed when I got the second version of the print back. I’ve corrected it on the file uploaded here, and will get a new print made when I get the prints made for assignment 3.

several points in a deliberate shape

4: Several Points in a Deliberate Shape

Two triangles combine to make a quadrilateral tilted away from the viewer like a ceiling over the ludicrously busy field. Your eye either moves round the edge of the shape, or zigzags up from the pole on the right, to the windmill, down to the power post and back up to the other smaller windmill. The slight a-symmetry of the distances off to the left and right edges of the shape make it more interesting than if I had moved off to the left, when I would have lost the way that the field above the road and the sky area locks jigsaw-like into the foreground bit of field with its run-to-seed docks and yellow flowers.

distinct, even if irregular, shapes

: 5: Distinct Shapes – Quadrilaterals

: 6: Distinct Shapes -Semi-Circle and Oblongs

: 7: Distinct Shapes – Quadrant, Quadrilaterals and a Perfect Right-Angled Triangle

I took advantage of the 10-15 picture scope for this assignment to add all three of these – a building of unknown purpose at Stangar head, the inside of the buried nissen hut that acted as the magazine for Buchanan Battery and a recycled nissen hut spotted on my way back to catch the ferry. I think compositionally the three work as a sequence, with the centrally placed doors of 5 and 6 creating a similarity with the curve of the nissen hut in 7 echoing the corrugated ribs in the roof of 6.

5 and 6 are fine (and I like the green object in 6 – a Heineken can? – in the lit part of the spill of earth into the hut, wishing the coke bottle in deep shadow over to the left was equally lit) but I’m particularly happy with 7 where planes merge into one another making shapes out of things that would have simply seemed unrelated if I hadn’t moved left and right, back and fore til they lined up and worked as a 2D arrangement…

curves

8: Curves

Here, I think the viewer’s eyes starts at the top left of the frame and follows the zig and the zag of the road down to the bottom right; the fence post directs the eye up to the cottage and then you track up the gentler curve of the horizon back to the top left. And then you do it again. It would be slightly better if i’d taken half a step to my left, lining up the ruined cottage’s chimney with the fencing stab, I think, but I can live with it as it is. Definitely among my favourites out of the pictures in the assignment.

diagonals

9: Diagonals

I spotted the playpark as I walked through the village and realised it was perfect for doing something that collapsed the many planes formed by the various bits of equipment into something much flatter. It was then huge fun to move left and right, step back and take a half step forward again, squat down, stand up, lean and lean back before taking each of the 3 pictures I took here. This is the one that creates the nicest chaos of diagonals, I think.

The only bit that I feel unhappy with is the very top where I can’t quite work out where the exact point to cut off the confluence of the near poles should be. As a result, it’s an ‘almost’ rather than a ‘definitely’. Getting it right would involve going back though, and I won’t be able to do that until next year now.

at least two kinds of implied triangle

: 10: Implied Triangles

: 11: Implied Triangles

: 12: Implied Triangles

Another group of 3 to take advantage of the 10-15 limit, as 10 manages to get the asked-for two with the obvious vanishing point of the road tailing off towards the horizon, and the inverted triangle formed by the two cottages on either side of the road and the inverted Stop! Children sign painted on the road. 11 was included as the first thing I thought when I noticed the two cottages and the bloke in a red caghoul, fixing a fence was “triangle!” – it proved a lot harder to get the red of the caghoul light enough and red enough (and the landscape light enough for it to show up strongly) than I thought it would. 12 is there because i like the way that the bank opening up to the concrete shelter on the right seems to lack any sense of depth, while pointing the way to a vanishing point somewhere off to the left. Also, it rhymes beautifully with the triangle formed by the washing lines in…

rhythm

13: Rhythm

…this one! Here I took several other shots, trying to get a fully left to right waveform from the clothes on the line; this was the one that worked best. Also, the way the gaps in the breezeblock wall and the fencing stabs below the washing move left to right in some sort of counterpoint helps the rhythmic feel here. the way the washing pole seems to bend into the picture helps too.

pattern

14: Pattern

As I said elsewhere, brick isn’t really a particularly Orcadian building material and is only really found in the wartime buildings that dot the landscape. I wish I’d been able to find a more imaginative pattern somewhere, but I didn’t, so here’s a section of the wall of the Fleet Communications Centre. After 70 odd years, at least the pointing is holding up…

Lastly, I confess that I have deviated from the order these are given in the Assignment Brief, as the images seem to flow better this way: eg the final implied triangle matches the way the washing lines fill the upper half of rhythm; the first four pictures go obviously one, two, three, four; diagonals goes quite naturally to the first implied triangle, and not just because they’re the only ones in portrait format.

At any rate, if I were to hang the prints on a wall, this is the order I would like you to walk past them.

Simon Chirgwin's Learning Log

BA Photography, Level 1 (PH4) Courses

Category Archives: ASSIGNMENTS

Assignment 5 – Ideas & Initial Research

References:

Assignment # 4 – Tutor’s Comments

Assignment 4 – further reading; stems, weeds and studies

Two modern Americans, with contrasting approaches to flower pictures:

3 photographers producing images that could be described as typographic:

3 photographers whose pictures of flowers seem more concerned with the conditions where the flowers grow than with the flowers per se:

References (all accessed 06-vi-15):

assignment 4 – light

Assignment 4 – Getting There

assignment # 3 – tutor’s comments & re-edited set

assignment # 3 – colour: pictures and commentry

Take about sixteen photographs:

…that illustrate the following colour relationships:

1: Colour Harmony through Complementary Colours

2: Colour Harmony through Similar Colours

3: Colour Contrast through Contrasting Colours

4: Colour Accent using any of the above

Assignment 3 – Getting There…

assignment # 2 – reflections and tutor’s comments

assignment # 2 – elements of design: pictures + commentry

Produce 10-15 photographs, all of a similar subject…

Flotta – Friday 1st August 2014

…between them they will show the following effects:

2: two points

a combination of vertical and horizontal lines

several points in a deliberate shape

distinct, even if irregular, shapes

curves

diagonals

at least two kinds of implied triangle

rhythm

pattern