Silent Spring...

I realised that the bird silhouettes were better than I first imagined, so this is the attempt that I decided to submit in the silent spring competition.

I would like to see other people’s attempts at the competition to see their work and their ideas just to be able to see different approaches to the brief. It’ll be interesting to see how they’re interoperated the book and the brief through their images. Looking at other people’s work when we’re working on the same brief definitely helps me with my own work, I also think that it helps me improve for the next assignment, as it tells me to be more experimental with my own work.

This is the first competition that I’ve ever entered with my work, and I would like to carry on entering more but it’s just trying to fit them around everything else. If it came down to choosing between college work and competitions, then I’d obviously go with college work, I think that I’d have to look around at the different competitions that can be entered and decide whether any of my images fit in with the categories.       

Graeme Lucas Timmins

I found the talk that Graeme Lucas Timmins gave was really fascinating.  It was interesting to hear his experiences within the industry and also how he’s made a name for himself when he’s only 24.  I think out of all the guest speakers we’ve had in, he is the most valid and the one I can relate to most because he was in a similar position to us only a few years ago.

 Even though his images wasn’t to my taste I fully respect him because he’s doing what he wants at such a young age, and not a lot of people can say that in the photography business.

I think everyone who listened to his talk can learn a lot from him.

Wales Weekend

Back home after a weekend in Wales I uploaded my images that I took, and I’m quite surprised with the results. I felt that I wasn’t capable of producing images like I have, but I still feel like they could be improved. I was using filters on my lens, using a Neutral Density, a Circular Polarising Filter and also a graduated filter. But I found that after looking at my images that the graduated filter wasn’t just on the sky but coming slightly on the land aswell, making some of the land in the images darker than the rest which is abit disappointing.
I decided to shoot the images in RAW in case some of the images were worth using and I think a few of them are, but I have improved some of them using Photoshop. Next time I go and take the images for this project, there’s a few things I’ve learnt that I will do differently.

Portraits or Landscapes?

I started thinking of ideas to do for portraits, and I thought of basing my photographing around the saying ‘Beauty comes from within’ and with this I was thinking of photographing women without make up, but having them dressed up for a night out, and looking quite glamorous just without the make up. I liked this idea but I just thought it would be quite difficult finding people who would want to be photographed without make up. I feel that this is a completely different approach to go with portraits and completely different to what everyone else does.

But I wasn’t sure where this would fit in well enough in any advertorial magazine so I started thinking of different ideas and I came up with the idea of photographing the coast and beaches, I’ve come up with this idea because I’m going away for this weekend in Wales so I thought that I could start photographing for it then and get ahead of the project. I know that I’m going to have to go a few more times but I’m going to get an idea of how the images will turn out. I feel that I’m going to enjoy doing this a lot more than doing the portraits, so I’ve decided that I will do some portraits in my own time for my portfolio.

Had my film developed, and I’m disappointed with the results. All the images look quite grainy, and it was only a 400 ISO film, so I’m quite surprised by that.
The cement works and full moon photos turned out to be blurry like I thought, but even if they weren’t blurry the images wasn’t very good anyway. The whole composition isn’t working for them, and I over exposed them, because the full moon is just a bodge of light instead of a circle. The only images I think I can work with are the silhouetted birds, and I’m still not that impressed with these.

I was thinking of developing another film but after scanning the bird images into the computer and onto the silent spring template they look quite good, so I think I’m going to work abit more on these images to produce a final image out of one of them.

I could have been a lot more organised on this assignment, and I feel out of all the assignment this is the one I’ve least concentrated on, and I wish I hadn’t now. I could have worked on a few more of my ideas, and I wished that I’d tried the close up on the hand dropping litter because I could see that working well and being quite effective. Its going to be interesting to see what everyone else has done for this project.

Last chance for the full moon.

Tonight was essentially the last night for me to produce some images with the full moon, and it still wasn’t in the right position but I took some images in spite of this. I thought this idea would work really well, and I was hoping it was going to be quite easy for me to get the moon in the right position but it just hasn’t gone my way at all. I’m quite gutted really because this idea would be perfect for the front cover for silent spring. I took a few photos just to show that I tried, but the composition is completely wrong, and I have a feeling that they will all be blurry because it was dark and I found it difficult to see to focus it manually, and it wouldn’t auto focus either. So I won’t be surprised if none of them are in focus.

Adding to the disaster of the night… the battery decided to die in my boyfriends van…typical…luckily I wasn’t far from home.

Harriet

Harriet a picture editor came to talk to the group today and also to give us another assignment. I found what she had to say was really interesting and it’s good to hear from an insider who does it for a living. Even though she’s not a photographer she has a lot of ideas of how the images are going to look, this is a different approach into going in to the business of photography and being in the background of everything.
I’d like to work with portraits with the assignment she’s set because it’s something I haven’t properly worked with yet, and I’d also like the work for my portfolio, so there’s two reasons why I’d like to do portraits, the only problem is thinking how to work with it, whether to do beauty or fashion and how to go about it. I’d also have to consider who to ask to model and whether I’d need to approach a model agency and try and get them for free, as I’ve heard other people in the class have managed to do.
I need to decide on what I want to do because we need to write a proposal to submit to her for the 25th February.

Full moon problems.....arrhh!!!

Because it’s snowing I’m having a few problems when photographing the full moon, mainly that the clouds are too thick because there’re snow clouds, that the full moon can’t be seen at all. It’s now the 10th of February, and I’ve got possibly another two days for myself to succeed in producing what I want. I’ve been out every night since the 6th of February but I haven’t succeeded in producing anything yet. A few problems that have occurred are
Cloudy skies throughout the night,
Snowing, very cloudy,
The full moon being in the wrong position, even when I travelled a far distance away from the cement works.
A few months ago I photographed the full moon behind the cement works, but it still slightly wasn’t in the right position and this is where my idea came from, and I was hoping that the moon would be in the right position one night out of the 6 nights, and it probably has been its just that I haven’t been able to see because of the clouds. I am disappointed that I haven’t produced anything yet but I’ve got another 2 nights to work with.
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… Please work out for me!

Inspiration for the brochure.

Visited Hoar Cross today for a tour around the whole place from the grounds, the rooms through to the spa and pools. The whole place is massive and this is something that we will have to consider when shooting for the brochure to make sure that the clients can feel the intensity of the place but I think that we won’t be able to illustrate how big it is in just a few images.

I was listening to a few ideas that the tour leader was suggesting and what she wants to come out of us, a few of these are to photograph the outside of the building at night when it’s all lit up as this is something that hasn’t been done before, another was to try and focus on things for men to do, and to try and encourage men to visit the place because at the moment the brochure seems only to be advertising to the women. So these are definitely things to consider.

Out of all the different areas we looked around the one that appealed to me the most was the grounds, but I still wasn’t getting much inspiration from it, which disappointed me because the whole place is a beautiful place. We’ve just got to make sure this comes across in the images. I feel that we’ve got a lot of pressure on the group to make sure that the brochure is exciting and informing enough about the place for the customers to wish to spend their money after looking at the brochure from our eyes.

From the impression I got from the two women who was giving us the tour was that the owner was quite old fashioned in the sense that he doesn’t want it to be too extravagant, but the two women who worked there wants something new and fresh to help appeal to a new age range of customers. So this is going to be difficult because there’s got to be some kind of compromise between the owner and the employers.

Snow....

Snow has decided to fall and more is expected… this has given me a problem when shooting for the silent spring competition because all my photographs will have to be shot with the snow and in some instances I would have preferred a clear ground, but that’s my own problem as I should have started sooner. I’m going to have to make do as the snow doesn’t seem to be clearing anytime soon.
I’m not 100% sure which idea will work out the best, but it’s going to have to be trial and error. I started shooting a few in my back garden today with the rubbish idea and I was working with different depth of fields, and trying to experiment in different positions and view points, I’m going to have to wait for the results to see if there’ve worked or not.
I can’t start shooting the full moon idea until the 6th, the actual full moon is on the 9th but anytime around the 6th to the 12th will work just as well, as it’s still nearly a full moon.