Finished Halo

I’ve finished my Halo poster. I’ve improved it a lot, I changed the colour, blurred the building and aircraft, added suitable aircraft and all together made the image so much better. I really didn’t like it before but I’m slightly warming to it. It’s probably one of the worst pieces that I’ve done, because it’s something I generally don’t do.

I think if we did more of these, I would get the idea and improve more each time, but considering it’s my first try at it, it’s not overall that bad, it could be worse. I kind of left this because I thought it would be quite quick to do so it’s thought me to not underestimate things otherwise in the future I might end up not having enough time to do certain things.

The figure looks more dominate in the image not that I’ve created some depth of field by using the Gaussian blur. I still don’t think it’s as good as it could be, but at the moment I can’t do anything more on it. 

Final Quad Images

Chris gave me the idea to rotate my motorway images to make it look quite abstract and they definitely look different and quite unusual. I think it’s definitely a step up from the previous images as I knew they were a predictable idea and I did want to recreate some different. Even though I do really like some of the original images this is a different approach to the idea.

 

I think if I was going to do this project differently I would have focused more on the people side instead of traffic, because I love the effect that people can create within slow shutter speeds. But even so I like the images that I’ve produced because they’ve different to what I would usually produce. I made them all square and added a white border to make them look finished and complete.

Halo - Photoshopping

I’ve started to put together my Halo using photoshop, what I’ve done so far isn’t particularly good and it can definitely be improved but I just need a little help to work photoshop with certain things. I think at the moment it all just looks added on and there’s just no depth to it at all, this is something that I can change to the image, an something that I will. Overall it looks a little dull and the composition doesn’t look brillant so I’m going to have to readjust a few things there aswell.

I’ve found this part of the assignment quite difficult because I didn’t think it would be hard to photoshop it all together but it’s definitely needs a lot of time and hard work put in to make the image look good, and because I’m not an expert at photoshop I’ve had to learn a few new things along the way. But it’s always good to learn new techniques.

Motorway Shutter Speeds

I produced slower shutter speed images over the motorway. Even thought this is a predictable idea, I still like the outcome. I think by starting with the most predictable idea will help me develop into more unpredictable views on the matter. You have to start somewhere, and I never know I could work with these images in some way, but make them looking different in some way.

With these images I was working with shutter priority, ranging from 2.5 sec up to 30 seconds. I think the range of the shutter can really make the images look different from really long line to shorter ones.  I think the only way to find the correct exposure for yourself is to experiment. Overall the images I produced are a good view of the results you can produce of this technique.

 

Podcasting - Sepia Tone

6 Week Schedule 

Week 1 - Learning how to use layers.

Week 2 - Adding a sepia tone to your images.

Week 3 - Using the Magnetic Lasso tool.

Week 4 -How to use the Tranform tool, Scale, Rotate etc.

Week 5 - Using the Photoshop Brushes and where to get them from.

Week 6 - How to use the Patch and Clone Tool.

I decided to change my pod cast in the end, and I’m really happy that I did. I used a tripod to keep the camera in the right position and to keep it steady. It is definitely an improvement to my first pod cast and it’s something I’ve learnt, it’s better to do something on your own then you get the results you want.  I changed the technique to teach people how to add a sepia tone to your image, this tutorial overall was better than the last because the end result in the first tutorial I did wasn’t particularly good.  As I did it again I thought I might aswell change the technique aswell. Overall it’s a stronger piece of work.

I quite enjoyed producing the pod cast, even though I made a few mistakes when talking, my English doesn’t sound very good. I can see how it fits on with photography with some senses but in us actually producing it, it doesn’t. Even though it’s not difficult to produce, its always good to know.

Quad - Slow Shutter Speeds

I was totally lost of what to do for the quad assignment, but then an idea came to mind, which is working with slow shutter speeds. I like this idea and I think I can incorporate it into one of the categories maybe the road trip one. I like the idea of working in the day and also at night.

I travelled to Stockport and experimented a bit with the moving traffic. I’ve decided on working with a tripod, because I only want the traffic moving and not the background, I’ve also invested in a shutter remote so this will also help with the camera shake. The images that I’ve produced could be improved but I only wanted to try the idea to see if this is what I wanted to work with, and I think it is.

I can see this idea working really well, I’ve got to make sure I get the right shutter speed and composition, otherwise it will look a bit messy and unfinished.

I’ve also just brought some filters for my lenses so this is also something I can experiment with.

After Effects

I don’t particularly know how to go about the after effects assignment. We didn’t get shown how to work the programme, and its something I’ve never used this software before, and its something totally new to me. We got given a sheet on what we had to do and got told to look at tutorials on the Internet, this still didn’t help.  It seems to me that the whole concept of after effects works only with a moving image, so to me I don’t see how this relates to photography.

I think to me the hardest thing about this assignment is not knowing how to use the software, getting to know how to work the software takes time, and I still struggle with Photoshop, and I used that software for over a year now. I think we need to get taught the basics at least because tutorials won’t help do this.

Ian Shipley - Feedback

I was quite nervous about the whole arrangement of Ian Shipley’s feedback afternoon because we had to show and present our cards in front of the whole class. I thought we would have had a one to one talk with Ian Shipley, but it didn’t work that way. I would have preferred it to be one to one as I would have felt more confident about talking about my work, as I’m not a very good speaker in front of a group of people. Because of this I don’t think I spoke about my work good enough as I could have. I think the feedback I received was more positive than I imagined, so I was generally quite happy with my work.

The only good thing about this format is getting a look in to see what everyone else had produced. There were quite a few people who also produced flower cards, but I found it interesting how we all did the layout and flowers differently. I kind of knew that they would be more than me who had done flowers because they are popular in the card industry.

Because I’m new to the college, it was also interesting to see the quality and ideas that the rest of my classmates have. I think in some ways presenting our images to everyone can help us all with ideas and the different ways people work. Over time, if this is how its done with every assignment, I will grow in confidence and hopefully it will become easier.

Michael Pinchbeck

I didn’t entirely understand Michael Pinchbecks work, he operates more with the insulation and performance side of art. I found his work interesting particularly his piece ‘The Long and Winding Road’, I’ve looked abit further into this project by looking at his blog www.acarhistory.blogspot.com. I understand his reasoning behind this art project but I found it hard to understand the others.

When I can see some pieces of art that have a meaning behind them, they make more me interested in them, as you can fully understand why the person has produced it. I think this is why I only understand and like ‘The Long and Winding Road’ because you know he’s done it from the heart.

Podcasting

Podcasting is quite a simple thing to do really, and actually quite boring. But the reasoning for making them is because they can be very informative, which is an important thing, because if you publish them on somewhere like ‘Youtube’ they can reach and help many people.

Initially the whole idea was slightly daunting, but once I realised what needed to be done it wasn’t so bad.

Our team decided on a series of Photoshop techniques, which seemed to be the most obvious thing to do really, I think Photoshop techniques is the most important as beginners to Photoshop really appreciate people posting tutorials.

We each made a decision on which area of Photoshop we wanted to do our pod cast on, and we filmed the screen with us each doing our method.

I think the filming process overall was abit of a shambles because they was zooming in and out and the whole pod cast looks abit messy, it would have made more sense to have the video recorder still and just focusing on the whole screen instead of how our team did it, the video looks quite confusing. I would like to re-film my technique but I’m not sure whether that will be allowed because the deadline was for 1 day.

Cards - Flowers

The card assignment has been more difficult than I first imagined, with the flower images I decided to go in the direction I was heading in the first place. I wanted them to look like cards instead of just images on cards, so I decided to play around with the layout, and decided on a square format and a layered look to the cards.

I’m quite proud of the finished items and I could see them on the shelves of the smaller craft shops, the only problem is that the theme flowers isn’t exactly unique which I was hoping to achieve when we first got set this assignment, but I think the layout I’ve given my cards are different to many of the flower cards which are selling.

There are many different approaches I could have taken when photographing flowers:

• In the studio
• In natural surrounding
• Black and White
• Colour
• Close Up
• From a Distance
• Singular
• A few flowers bunched together
• Artificial/ Real
  

My favourite way to photograph flowers is close up to capture the details of the flowers, and this comes across in my images, which is what I set out to achieve in the first place. Above are the finished items and as you can probably see they work well as a set of cards.

Quad

Our new assignment is set my Quad in Derby. We are to produce 5 images from one of these themes:
· Road Trip
· Film Star/ Femme Fatale/ Hero
· Photo Story
· Film Still
· Film Noir
· Suspense

These categories potentially could be quite difficult as you have to think of original ideas instead of thinking of the obvious. The two categories which stand out to me are road trip and suspense, I have some kind of idea of what I would like to work with but I’m going to look into each of the categories before I make a decision. We have about a month to do this assignment so I’m going to learn from past mistakes and start as soon as possible.

I didn’t fully understand the tour of Quad due to the fact that I found it hard to understand what the bloke who was leading the tour was saying. As far as I could hear it didn’t relate to the assignment, apart from the presentation at the beginning.

There was a guest speaker talking to us about his work, which was really inspiring to see. His inspiration of creating his work comes from his background and the fact that he’s mixed race. I found it interesting how he came to produce work to help him find his identity with experimenting with body as his canvas. I found the whole talk fascinating and I loved his work.

This has taught me that if you have a unique and different approach to your work then you might get the chance to get noticed.

Halo Shoot

The halo shoot was more difficult than I imagined. I would have liked to know how to work the lighting myself but all that was done for me, it’s definitely something I would like to learn in the future.

I was quite lucky because I needed to buy some plastic guns for my model to hold and I found some that looks similar to the ‘spider’ gun from the game, and with abit of photo shopping, I think it will look a lot better and realistic.

Back to the shoot – I was finding it difficult to focus on my models mask because I was lying on the floor, it was automatically focusing on their hand, and it was too dark to focus it manually, so this is the only disappointment of the shoot.

After looking at the shots, there’s a few ok ones, they need abit of adjusting but I think it might just be a success, hopefully.

New Media

I haven’t been very organised with this assignment at all, it was only two days before the assignment was due in that I fully understood what was asked of us. So this has definitely taught me to be more organised. I haven’t quite got into the flow of the whole assignments yet, I’m used to doing long project at a time, whereas because we have a few going at a time, it doesn’t seem like we have long producing them.

So this is something that I will have to be aware of when were set another assignment and to make sure that I set out a plan on when I want certain things to be done by otherwise I’m going to find myself in the same situation again.

Once I knew what I was doing with this assignment, it all came together quite easily. I decided on doing a PowerPoint as I wasn’t entirely sure how in depth we had to go into when writing an essay. I’m relieved this assignment is complete as I can now carry on completing the card assignment which is due in next week.

Even if I was more organised and started sooner with this I probably still would have come out with the same outcome, but luckily it was only all written work as I didn’t actually have to produce any images for it, otherwise I would have been in trouble.

Tutorial

My first tutorial was helpful but left me quite confused. Showing Chris and Julian my research folder from last year was really useful because this is similar to how they want us to do it on this course, I was slightly wary on how to do the research but this has definitely helped me.

As I haven’t come up with any other ideas for the card assignment, I’ve decided to go with my initial idea which is flowers. Even though there isn’t many photographic cards in shops there are lots of cards with drawn, artistic flowers so there’s some market out there for them.

The type of photos I’ve taken are close up of the flowers which I prefer, but Chris and Julian advised me to make it look simpler by photographing an entire flower, maybe in a vase, in the studio. I will experiment abit further before I finally decide in which direction to go.

Overall the tutorial definitely helped as it answered questions that I’ve been worried about for a while, so I’m going to try and book a tutorial slot quite often.

Martin Creed - Ikon Gallery

Martin Creed’s work…well what can I say.. it’s not art.

I just don’t see the point in it, it just seems to me that he’s got a bad case of OCD. The best bit of the exhibition was the lift and that was only because it was humorous, but with the rest I just can’t take it serious at all. People will look at his work and think I can do that, all you have to do is explain why you’ve done it and then it can be taken serious by the art critics.



Is this what contemporary art is meant to be? Simple, unstructured work. I didn’t learn anything from this experience, only that this man is probably being paid a fortune for producing something that anyone could do, it’s just that he did it first.

Halo

The studio’s been booked for Tuesday 4th November for me to photograph my ‘halo’ character, my costumes arrived and it’s not as good as I expected, its going to need a lot of work doing in Photoshop but at least I’ve got the base and structure of the character I need. I wouldn’t be able to work without a costume so its not an entire waste of money. There’s certain aspects of the costume that I will need to work around because the mask is only a half mask so there’s no back to it, so this will affect the angles I can work from.

Things are going well so far in this assignment so I might take a back seat on this and concentrate a little more on the other two assignments as they are due in sooner than this assignment. I’ve realised that I’m going to have to set myself deadlines on when certain parts of the assignments should be complete, as I am getting a bit behind on parts of the course. Otherwise I’m going to leave everything till the last minute and never get anything complete to a high standard.

Shugborough Hall

The trip to shugborough hall was the first chance we had to work for

clients, but to me the woman who came to speak to us wasn’t particularly clear on what she wanted. She asked if we could photograph the characters and she said all the staff knew that we would be about, but whenever you came across a character they didn’t have a clue what we were on about, even so they were all very polite and willing to participate.

When it came to working with and photographing the characters, I realised I need more confidence as I’m abit scared about leading and directing, but hopefully this course will help me gradually grow in confidence as I would like to do portraiture in the future.

Certain parts of the day flew by before you even realised what time it was, so this is something you definitely have to consider when working with clients. I did notice certain people hanging around taking pictures of the same item for probably 20 minutes instead of exploring the rest of the surrounding around them. I decided to explore myself and I found some interesting features.

I personally don’t think I did very well at this exercise, I think I would have tried a lot harder if it was just myself producing the pictures. Everyone’s going to have similar photographs as we were set a ‘loose’ brief so there isn’t much fun in it. But I suppose if you want to work for clients then its something you’ll have to get used to.

Digital Media is...

I’m going to find Lance’s assignment the hardest which is to research and evaluate what Digital Media is. I find starting an essay like this very difficult as I just don’t know where to start and I’m not the best at writing essays either. I’ve researched in many places what digital media is and its so vast, I just don’t know where to begin with it all.

Instead of writing an essay we could present it in other ways such as a single image, but to me even though I hate essays I think an essay will be the easiest to get the point across. I’m still abit unsure about this assignment but as soon as I get my head around it hopefully I should be ok.

Photographic Composites

For steves assignment we have to reproduce a film or game poster/ front cover. The idea of this assignment is to photograph the different layers such as the character, the background or the other various layers, which are needed. I’m going to find this assignment really interesting to do, as I haven’t really worked much with Photoshop, so it’s going to fun to learn and edit the layers. I can see this being fairly hard work but I’m up for the challenge.

The game that I’m going to base my project around is Halo 3; I feel that this will be an interesting idea to do. I haven’t worked in a proper studio before so I’m going to need help setting the cameras and lighting up. I’m looking forward to working in the studio, as I would like to do more studio work in the future.

I’ve found the costume on ‘EBay’ that is the most affordable one that my model will be wearing. I could spend £500 on an identical outfit but that would just be stupid when I can just Photoshop the costume I’m buying to make it look better. I’m excited about this assignment, as I kind of know what I’m doing and it’s something I’ve never done before and I can learn a lot from the techniques that we will be using.

Card Publishing

We’ve been given our first assignment which is to produce a series of 6 to 12 images which is appropriate to use on retail cards. I’m slightly worried about this assignment as I haven‘t really got any great ideas to use. But seeing Ian Shipley was a fantastic experience and has made me be a little more open minded about the whole thing. I would love to produce such a unique idea as himself with his ‘Violent Veg’ series of cards and other various items it has gone on to produce. But thinking of a unique idea is a difficult job. I’ve had a look on the website ‘Moonpig’ but it really didn’t help me at all so I’m going to have to go else where for inspiration.

I really like the idea of this assignment as it’s not just a pointless project that I’m used to doing, we’re actually going to experience what card publishers are thinking when having to produce fresh new ideas which will sell as cards. If all assignments are as creative as this assignment I know that I’m going to really enjoy doing this course.

Meeting Ian Shipley was interesting and it would be a great experience to be able to work with him as I can see him teaching us a lot about the real world of photography.

1st Post... What is a blog?

A blog is like a journal that can be viewed online. Which can incorporate links to websites that back up ideas or thoughts. People also upload images. People mostly update their blogs daily. Blogs can be written on a wide variety of subjects ranging from photography to political views or just simply on personal experiences. Blogs are displayed in reverse chronological order.