Final reflections on The Art of Photography

TAOP is complete and submitted for assessment in March 2013, so it’s time to consider a final evaluation, a self-appraisal if you like, of what I have achieved and what I have learnt, as well as to consider what went well and what didn’t.

First and foremost, it has been enormously enjoyable, and that’s what I started the course for.  Like many OCA students, I’ve done the scrapping for marks and grades in an earlier life, so this was all about expanding my photographic horizons beyond those I have previously developed as a hobby wildlife photographer, and trying to connect with the artist aspects of making images. 

Distance learning has been an interesting and new experience for me and one I have enjoyed.  I think I have maintained motivation throughout the first year and apart from a few employment related slowdowns in output, have maintained a consistent pace throughout the course and certainly never lost focus on what I was trying to achieve.  Given that there is no cohort entry into the OCA courses it is expected that as new ‘rules’ and documentation are issued they appear at different stages of a student’s progress and additions to reading lists and availability of clearer assessment submission guidelines materialised towards the end of my first module. I don’t see that as a problem, just an observation of an inevitable part of an open entry course.

There is opportunity to spend several years over TAOP if I had wished, and with that could potentially come the chance to go and re-shoot assignments to try and improve submissions based on feedback, growing knowledge and experience.  However, I resolved from the outset that I would get this done in one year if work allowed, and I certainly don’t feel that I would gain significantly from repeating what I have already done.  I am sure that I could garner a few extra assessment marks if I went back and photographed again some of my early efforts, and I could definitely add a lot more ‘learning’ and study visit experiences, but that would defeat my personal purpose.  On the student forums there does seem to be a lot of debate over marks and comparisons between achievements, but given that students can build work over a flexible number of years, I don’t really see this as particularly valid.  I will gain more from moving on to DPP than I will from dwelling on TAOP I think.

There is no doubt that I have developed a far greater awareness of possibilities for photographs when I’m out with the camera, and as I will elaborate later, have developed the beginnings of an instinct for spotting contrasts and design elements and for pictures that ‘work’.  This has been a huge improvement in my photography and probably the biggest change attributable to spending the time on TAOP.

Contrasts

Contrasts was the first opportunity to photograph to a ‘set’ brief, albeit a very wide one.  This was not as simple as it seemed and initially I fell into the trap of assuming knowledge on behalf of the viewer would inform their understanding of the contrast portrayed, rather than solely using the images to show unequivocally what the contrast actually was.  However, some helpful tutor guidance steered me away from a couple of early blunders and I was pleased with the set at the time.  However, looking back after nearly a year, I do cringe at several of the choices and would certainly never repeat some of the shots I took back then.  This is good, as it clearly means I have changed in my views and thought processes and I am sure that I could go back now and interpret the contrasts in a far more imaginative way and deliver some better images than I did with quite a constrained approach in the early days.  I think the biggest change in my photography over this year has been the expanding ability to think more widely about the subject when interpreting a brief and not be too limited by precise instruction, although at times I have found this hard as I don’t think I have a very artistic way of thinking about things.

Elements of Design

This was an opportunity to investigate shapes and I think was the high point of TAOP as far as the photographs I took were concerned.  I decided to use the Embankment area of London as a theme for the assignment and also chose to work in black and white so I could focus on design and shape and not be deflected by the presence of colour.  Getting narrowed down to a location and a medium from the outset worked well, as did the opportunity to make a number of visits to improve and expand the portfolio of images from which I eventually drew the submission.  I found that I started to spot ‘elements of design’ quite easily after a while and this has not stopped since, becoming a regular feature of my photography – I often spot and photograph ‘shapes’ that fit this brief and have collected a great many more over the last year, although I have no plans to start replacing the originals I submitted. 

Colour

Well I thought this was going to be easy, everything is coloured, right … ?  And that was part of the problem.  Deprived of the focus of a topic and left to photograph anything, I got somewhat derailed at the start by trying to be too precise in finding the exact colour and in trying to compose images where the colours I wanted were just too large a part of the picture and in too precise a ratio.  I didn’t think the course guidelines were too helpful in this respect, although Michel Freeman’s Photographer’s Eye set me down the road to what I think I was trying to achieve.  I tried to get a mixture of still life, outdoor and indoor images for this assignment, although I guess the easiest option would be to go for still life indoors and select a topic such as food where colour and proportion could be more easily controlled.  This was one Assignment where I did decide to make a few late changes in images for final submission for Assessment, so hopefully they are an improvement. 

Light

In the initial exercises I experimented with a couple of statues and vases, which served well to develop some rudimentary lighting skills and an understanding of how to emphasise various features of a subject.  However, my final choice was a loaf of bread as suggested by my tutor.  This indeed worked well and I was able to illustrate shape, colour, form and texture indoors with lights and candle light and outside with sunlight.  The biggest improvement here came with the purchase of a couple of decent constant lights and attendance at an RPS portrait photography weekend workshop, both of which gave me the chance to practice the impact of lighting changes, and both of which gave me a real boost forwards for later parts of the course.
The work with the loaf took me quite some time and numerous attempts to get the images as I wanted them without having to do much in Photoshop afterwards.  This was an important personal goal here as I wanted to learn to get it right in camera and not to substitute post-production for what I ought to be able to get right in the first place.  I also discovered that unless you have a series of stands and clamps and an assistant, you need four hands to set up some lighting arrangements.

Illustration and narrative

The subject for this was to a large extent dictated by the time of year.  Indeed there are many events around Christmas that could potentially be researched and photographed, but they tend not to be occurring in my life and work in any way that I could envisage being available to shoot a sequence of images to tell a cohesive story.  I eventually went for the concept, design and fabrication of a piece of silver jewellery which gave me an interesting number of technical and narrative challenges.  However, it did give me a subject  to which I had ready access and was able to shoot on a number of different occasions to fulfill the objective of telling a story from beginning to end, and hopefully using a range of the techniques which had been covered on the course thus far.  I had the aspiration of bringing shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, focal length, use of colour, lighting skills and composition into the images and then using what I had learnt of illustration to compose images of different sizes into a final document.  I was really pleased with the outcome of this as the final output from TAOP and I would not have done this anywhere near as well a year ago.

Finally, there are the other parts of the course and the learning that went with the practical photography.  I read a number of books which were on the reading list for TAOP as well as some recommended by my tutor and others that I discovered along the way or through discussion on the student forums; these have mostly been reviewed elsewhere on this blog and my thoughts can be found under the Book Reviews tab in the side bar.  Apart from the technical material, the rest was new to me and I derived a great deal from the coverage of the history of photography and the works of various celebrated photographers and fine artists.  I also, for the first time really, started to appreciate pictures from their artistic point of view and developed some basic skills and knowledge in the reading of a photograph, although I do fundamentally disagree with the interpretations propounded by some authors where I am sure they are reading far too much into serendipity.  A debate for another day and another module though …

The four OCA study visits I attended were a vital element for me in not only getting the opportunity to talk through images with tutors and other students, but also to be able to put names to faces of some of the people I ‘met’ through the OCA students forum and through the Flickr site.  Several of these have been an excellent source of advice in matters relating to the course and in offering help and encouragement through TAOP – you know who you are, so great thanks.  Everyone has something new to suggest and books and websites which have contributed to my overall learning have been numerous.  I was also able to make a number of gallery visits on my own, and again the learning from the course enabled me to really start to get to grips with some of the images I saw.

The OCA Photography student’s weekend residential event in Leeds was a great success for me and it was the first time I had met face to face with several people I had been corresponding with online and the chance to have informal discussions with tutors and other students was invaluable and enriched the whole learning experience.  The lecture content suited me well and I thought the portfolio session was a real eye opener as it was the first time I had produced images other than wildlife shots for critique and discussion. Although it is difficult to achieve I would like to see some form of ‘live’ tutorials taking place as it just adds so much to breaking inevitable barriers associated with distance learning.  I have recently become involved with a regional Thames Valley OCA group, so hopefully some of the plans to meet informally as a student group will come to fruition.  Our first gathering at Somerset House in January to look at Henri Cartier-Bresson was certainly a successful venture.

Blogging was something I enjoyed and I really forgot the online element and public visibility very quickly and just got on with it.  Blogger has some irritations and seemed unreliable with the placement of pictures unless you just wanted them lined up down the middle of a page, and its handling of text was at times bizarre.  However, as long as it was kept simple, it worked well enough, although next time I will structure my blog differently with greater emphasis on the learning and less on the exercises and assignments.

I was glad that I kept the hard copy learning journal as well as the blog, as it gave me somewhere to consider images which were not available on line.  However, as I became more aware of the excellent and readily available press packs which galleries were willing to make available to students, and how willing some quite well known photographer were to grant access to images with acknowledgement, the hard copy journal got used far less.  I may continue with this is the future, although at the time of writing I’m not convinced.

Tutor responses to assessments were rapid and very helpful, with valuable pointers on how I could improve images and my approach as well as helpful suggestions on reading. 

This will just about be the last post in this TAOP blog apart from when I add the final mark in case it is of use to anyone who reads this far in the future, so it’s off to DPP ……

Understanding photographs - and books reviewed

Full bibliographic details in the blog sidebar

Since starting the course back in February I have accumulated a number of books that have been either specified course reading materials, tutor recommendations of suggestions from other students that have cropped up in the OCA student forum or on the flickr discussion site.  I have wanted to produce a short review of some of these for a while, but decided to wait until getting quite well through the course before assembling my notes into something more substantial as I generally read the books through and then dipped into them periodically as the course progressed.  There is no doubt that my opinions of some of the content and its meaning has changed over the last few months as has my view of the comparative utility of some of the material, so it seemed appropriate to wait until this juncture.  Much of the guidance for TAOP is derived from Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye, but I’ll be saving final thoughts on that until I have finished Assignment 5 and submitted for assessment in March.

When I started the course I was very new to the study of photographic images as art and took a very narrow perspective on much of my early reading outside of the entirely technical material.   Although I would claim no expertise in this whatsoever after ten months study, going back into the books in the light of experiences gained, particularly on study days, has to an extent changed my view of some of the views expressed by ‘art writers’.

Grahame Clarke’s “The Photograph” initially provides a fairly standard introduction to the historical development of photography from the time of Niepce, through wet-plate photography to the present day, but then launches into  “rather than endorse Baudelaire’s disparaging remarks about its limited capacity for reflecting the superficial aspect of things, this Wordsworthian (even Ruskinian) perspective mythicizes the notion of insight over sight.” I think this makes assumptions about the reader and narrows the field of appeal somewhat, although I’m sure that many of my biochemical writings over the years would have been equally impenetrable to Mr Clarke ...  However, as the book progresses through developing knowledge of how to read a photograph to the sections on landscape, the city, the portrait, the body and documentary photography, the language becomes less obtuse, or maybe I got used to it, and the narrative appears to develop at a faster pace.  I have returned to the chapter on documentary photography a number of times in response to thoughts I have had following various gallery visits, especially Magnum62 and the Prix Pictet 2012 exhibitions. Clarke writes at some length about the importance of Magnum in defining the development of documentary photography and how it drove the development of the genre.

The final chapter, “The cabinet of infinite possibilities” contains an excellent review of the works of Cartier-Bresson and how he opens the world to the camera lens rather than the converse, which Clarke argues is also applicable to most other established ‘art’ photographers.  The book concludes with an enlightening timeline showing the key developments in photography plotted alongside the political and cultural events of the same time in history.

The most significant change for me between my reading of Clarke’s book at the start of the course and my perceptions of it during later visits, is certainly around the subject of how to read a photograph.  Although I think too much interpretation is placed by authors on the content and meaning of some photographs, I have certainly started to learn how to look at an image and see aspects that the photographer intended … or did they ….?

Charlotte Cotton’s “The photograph as contemporary art” was another book I read as part of my introduction to TAOP and commences with “ … the art world embraces the photograph as never before and photographers consider the art gallery or book as the natural home for their work .. “  The first chapter “If this is art” focusses on the act of orchestrating images directly for the camera and makes the point that the creation of  these pieces of art start a long time before the camera is involved in generating the final photographs.  Although I assume that many images have been selected for their somewhat extreme exemplification of the genre, I do find it hard to relate to the works of Edwin Wurm and Tatsumi Orimoto especially.  Orimoto’s photographs of people with bread tied round them are just bizarre.

The second chapter deals with storytelling and presents a good review of the photographers who specialise in the creation of tableaux for their art.  Jeff Walls’ Insomnia features here and this was recently the subject of debate on Weareoca following a post on the subject from Sharon Boothroyd.  Another chapter that resonated with me was Moments in History in which Cotton considers how photography contributes to the reporting and understanding of world events.  She points out that contemporary art photographers have generally taken an ‘anti-reportage stance’, consequently taking a more contemplative approach with medium and large format equipment.  Sophie Ristelhueber’s portrayals of Middle East conflicts and their aftermath produce some poignant images.

Overall, I thought Cotton’s book provided an excellent introduction to photography as a contemporary art form.  It was fast paced and easy to read and brought out the key points, and indeed the key images, to exemplify her points.

Another book I used for introductory reading was Mary Warner Marien’s “Photography: a cultural history”.  This is a mighty tome of a book and at 552 pages and larger than A4 in size, puts many phone directories to shame!  This was by far the best of the introductory texts and I found it immensely entertaining, and with its large format, had the benefit of big pictures which were printed at high quality compared to Cotton and Clarke.  She covers photography in art, science, sociology, travel, war and fashion as well as its development as a tool of the mass media.  The focus throughout is more on the key concepts than on specific individual photographers and it also contains what I thought was the best review of the history of the development of photography that I found, all accompanied by excellent illustrations.  There is even room for a short section on scientific photography which covers Eadweard Muybridge’s work on the science of animal locomotion and spares a few words for Rontgen and the discovery of the potential of x-rays.  It is the easiest of the three books to dip back into and I thought had by far the most attractive and appealing layout – not just due to the larger size, but due to the way in which the image panels were interspersed to break up the text, and the ‘Focus’ sections which cropped up now and again in most chapters to add detail in specific areas, but which were not essential to the casual reader.  All in all the best of the three and I would recommend it highly as long as you don’t need to travel with it!

Reflections at half time ...

With Assignments 1 (Contrasts), 2 (Elements of Design) and 3 (Colour) completed, it is time to reflect on where I am with TAOP.  Contrasts went smoothly enough and I found that once I got started the opposing pairs of images came together quite well.  I still need to produce a photograph for ‘low’ that has a connection to my selection for ‘high’ for which I used The Shard in London as suggested by my tutor.  I have a couple of locations in mind and will ensure that these pictures are taken and added to the final set intended for submission at Assessment.

Elements of Design was successful I think, certainly in terms of tutor response, and I found the strict focus on one location to look for suitable material a big help, as was the opportunity at the time to be able to make a number of repeat visits until I felt I had a decent image to represent each of the design elements.  It was also a first real journey into the world of digital black and white in any sort of serious way and I was really pleased with the outcome, both from the perspective of image quality and from that of being able to isolate and restrict the design elements to actual shapes rather than being drawn into using coloured areas to define them.  I will certainly be drawing on this experience later in the course and intend to deliver another black and white project at some stage.  I always felt on top of Elements and was happy that I knew where I was going and what the intended outcome was, and also felt able to make some difficult selections from a significant amount of material.  It is an essential skill to be able to fine down to a required number of images and I certainly hope to be able to maintain this as I go along and not fall into the trap of submitting ‘extra’ images rather than making hard choices.

Colour was hard work, and I have mentioned this briefly before.  I originally intended to work with the natural world, but in order to meet the brief I strayed away from this concept and consequently found that without focus it became much more difficult.  I also discovered that finding the appropriate colour combinations is not easy, and finding the complementary colours in the ‘correct’ ratios even less so once you get away from set up situations.  I had hoped to avoid the truly mundane in the images I collected, but I think failed in this regard with some of them!  I rarely felt in control of Colour and am determined to get back on track with Light.

Am I developing my own photographic voice yet?  Well, no, and I had not expected to this early in the course, but hopefully that will start to emerge at some stage beyond TAOP.  The voice may not be there, but I am starting to feel comfortable with subjects outside wildlife and beginning to ‘see’ opportunities for photographs that I would certainly never have spotted or considered pre-OCA.

The visits to the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, Magnum62, The Deutsche Borse Prize 2012 and Japanese Photobooks exhibitions at The Photographers Gallery, the Edward Burtynsky exhibition at the London Festival of Photography, and various Tate Modern exhibitions all considerably enriched the experience of the first three units of the course and enabled me to get a little way down the road to being able to read a photograph and see more of its meaning than what is obvious simply from its content.  I still do not see in many ‘classic’ photographs what some authors claim to be there, and I will take a lot of convincing to believe that the subtleties bestowed on some images is not just the result of serendipity!  However, a second read of Graham Clarke’s ‘The Photograph’ did make more sense than it did during the first week I was doing the course. 

Reflection could not be complete without mention of the excellent time spent in the company of nineteen other OCA photography students at the residential weekend in Leeds.  I won’t repeat what I blogged earlier about this, but it really gave some context and meaning to the course and removed many of the inevitable barriers which come with any form of distance learning.

Introductory texts

There has been recent debate on the student forum regarding the textbook issued by OCA to accompany The Art of Photography.  Graham Clarke’s “The Photograph” stirs mixed emotions as far as broad accessibility of the text is concerned, and I certainly found it quite hard work to read, steeped in classic ‘artistic’ English and flowing prose as it certainly is.  I think it does however deal very well with the historic development of photography and with the major photographers who have contributed to the development of the still image, although I do find the intensely detailed (and I think entirely speculative) interpretations placed upon some of the photographs difficult to rationalise.  The Diane Arbus image “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, New York, 1969” seems to me to be a shot of just that, yet Clarke (on page 31) attributes “a larger condition, at once cultural, social and in this instance, psychological” and a whole plethora of interpretations based around elements of the image.  I just don’t see it and it reminds me of English lessons at school when I was taught about how Shakespeare must have been feeling when he penned certain scenes in Macbeth ..  However, the image recently sold for $91,000, so I guess I must be wrong !!

I have looked at a couple of other texts that delve into the history of photography and consider the photograph as contemporary art.  These were “Photography : a cultural history” by Mary Warner Marien (2002) and “The Photograph as Contemporary Art”  by Charlotte Cotton (2009).  Cotton is a concise work that is clearly subdivided into photographic cultural genres although retains some of the feeling of Clarke (2007) in terms of the linguistic devices used, but Marien is far more accessible, at least in my view, in terms of the language deployed to discuss the history of photography as an art form.  However, and it is a big however, Marien is a massive tome the size of a telephone directory, with 532 pages of small font, although with significantly larger pictures (it is a bigger book!) than the other two offerings.  Overall, I think Clarke is a good introduction in terms of its concise nature and its focus on the ‘classic’ images and photographers, and I can understand why it was chosen by the OCA, but Marien achieves more for those with time on their hands or wanting to dip into it without necessarily following the structure imposed by the author.

PART 1 : Final thoughts

Well, I’ve completed the exercises and non-assessed Assignment 1 in about 10 weeks, which in view of limited time and the length of some of the exercises themselves, I am very pleased with, especially as the first time round it inevitably takes time to set up the blog and establish a way of working to complete the exercises and consider what has been learnt from each. 

More pleasing in many ways is the amount of background reading I have completed (see the references list in the blog side bar) and the influence and inspiration I have gained from the events I have attended.  I am genuinely surprised at how much of a difference I have seen in my own photography and how I approach taking a picture, even with the subject types with which I am most familiar.  Additionally, I have found that I now take a much more considered approach to reading photographs and thinking about the relationship between their individual elements and also to how my eye moves around an image and how I feel about what I see.

Blogging has been a great way of recording progress through the course, although the vagaries of Blogger are irritating in the extreme.  I write everything in Word using Ariel 11 font before uploading, and Blogger’s habit of changing font size, adding in extra line spaces occasionally obliterating paragraphs which were clearly present is bloody annoying.  The hard copy Learning Journal has been a success and has enabled me to capture prints of some of the images I was not able to reproduce in the blog other than by linking to originals.  I have treated it as more of a scrap book and it has been good to be able to revisit pages and scribble in notes as thoughts have occurred to me.  My tutor has stated that he does not need this to be submitted for the first non-assessed assignment, but I will be sending it along on subsequent occasions as I believe that it adds significantly to the blog and has always been produced with the intention of the two being followed side by side.

The visit to the Taylor-Wessing portrait competition was a real eye opener - the first non-wildlife photography exhibition I have attended – and it was fascinating to see the differences between the highly contrived studio or location portraiture and the ad hoc images which were taken as a situation was found.  The latter category made more impact on me initially as it seemed more real, but upon a month’s reflection, I will confess to a growing interest in understanding and actually doing some studio based portrait photography myself.  To this end I have signed up to do a two day studio workshop run by the Royal Photographic Society, which I am sure will be of major benefit later in the OCA course.  This is run at Lacock in Wiltshire, conveniently close to the Fox Talbot Museum for a little inspiration.

The New Documentary Forms exhibition at the Tate Modern also made me think more widely about my own photography and especially in producing images that lead the eye around complex scenes – my own work is often of single discrete subjects, as is much wildlife imagery, and I have promised myself that I will make a serious effort throughout the course to consider options to have more content in images where there is potential to do that ….. which of course means thinking about how I want the eye to travel round the image and the message I want to convey.

Michael Freeman (2007) in The Photographer’s Eye covers many of the things I need to consider to make greater impact in my own photography, and his points around composition especially hit home and will be remembered in the future.  The other book which made particular sense was Chris Gomersall’s (2012) Wildlife Photographer – a Course in Creative Photography, especially his focus on taking images that are either narrative and create a sense of place, or abstract close ups to really generate interest in the viewer.  I have attended a number of the author’s workshops and will be doing so again in April by attending his Birds of the North Norfolk photo tour.  In addition to concentrating on portraits of the birds, I will be making a special effort to look more widely around the habitats and see what creativity I can come up with and how much better I can use the available light than I have done in the past.

Starting the OCA course has also widened the range of periodical photographic literature I have reviewed with the monthly Black and White Photography making me think far outside what I have done before, and I have experimented with some of my existing images to produce mono conversions in Lightroom 4.  I have processed several of my Contrasts assignment images in mono, and they were amongst my favourites of those I submitted.  I have downloaded a trial version of Nik software’s Silver EfexPro to check out as well, although I don’t plan to get too far into that at this stage other than to develop a general idea of how it compares with Lightroom 4 black and white conversions (far better by many accounts, but we’ll see).

As far as the OCA is concerned I have been a reasonably regular contributor to the student forums and have also signed up to attend the first ever weekend photography students conference in Leeds in September where it will be good to meet some of the tutors and other students from the course.  This is largely aimed at those further along the road to BA and beyond Level 1, but it will be a valuable insight into what is coming in the future.

So, all in all, a lot has happened since the Big Red Folder fell through the letterbox at the end of January.  A couple of thousand images I would never have taken before have been taken, books that would never have been read have been read, photographers I have never heard of have been studied, and there has been a total change in thought process and approach. Can’t be bad …… onward to Elements of Design!! 

I plan to complete Elements of Design by June 30^th 2012.

A simple twist of fate ...

By a strange twist of fate, the Royal Photographic Society magazine just dropped through the letterbox .. it contains an article by John Migden called “The Aesthetic of the Real” and is a review of the New Documentary Forms exhibition that I recently described following my visit to the Tate Modern a few days ago (see the entry for March 17th).  I’ll put more about this in the hard copy journal so I can reproduce some of the text and images.

As did I, Migden chose to focus on the works of Luc Delahaye and Mitch Epstein as his main theme (so I got something right then!), and also included Akram Zaatari, in which I had found very little appeal.  Zaatari’s studio shots from the Lebanon in the 50’s do have a certain edgy quality, given that they are developed from negatives that an attempt had been made to destroy, but the powerful symbolism felt by Migden certainly escaped me.  Zaatari did portray another pair of spooky twins (well, not quite, but identically dressed girls posed in a similar way to Arbus) to go alongside Diane Arbus’s well known picture and Maja Daniels’ image that I highlighted from the Taylor-Wessing portrait exhibition (see Feb 6^th entry), and I will add these to the collection in my hard copy Learning Journal !

The RPS article also highlights the detachment that one feels from viewing the Delahaye images and how he takes an almost dispassionate and distant view from scenes of war and suffering.  Interestingly, the author focused on the “most confrontational” Epstein image that I found the least appealing.  “Biloxi, Mississippi (2005)” is an image of social destruction taken following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.  There is certainly a lot going on in the image and much for the eye to travel round and absorb, but I found it too fragmented to be attractive.  This could be because in many ways it is the opposite to much of my own photography which tends to be of single and discrete objects.  Interesting thought maybe, and a good learning point to consider for something to try at a later stage and give the viewer more to look at in my own work.

The one Epstein image reproduced by Migden in the article was the “Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia, 2004” although oddly therefore, he does not comment on the image in the text.  It was one of the images I selected to discuss in my hard copy Learning Journal as well.

Reference

Migden, J., The Aesthetics of the Real, The Royal Photographic Society Journal, pp92-95 (March 2012). London, EC1 Publishing Ltd.

Location, location, location .....

I have given a lot of thought to places that I could visit to take photographs that address various aspects of the course.  These would have to be within reasonable distance of home (less than an hour) and ideally afford opportunities to shoot design themes, colours, lighting etc. in a few visits.  Local scenic spots and buildings lend themselves well to some elements of the course and churches and churchyards are a rich source of possibilities (especially shapes).  One of the best location types I have found for design elements and people are preserved steam railways (no, I’m not a train spotter!) and these also give opportunities for shooting colours and movement. 

London obviously has limitless photographic opportunities, although I have chosen to focus on the Embankment area to reduce the strong likelihood of chasing off after too many themes! 

The potential locations that I planned to include in TAOP have been marked on a map that has been included in my hard copy Learning Journal along with the subjects that I plan to focus on when I am there.

I have learnt so far that it is good advice to have a list of shots I definitely want to take before visiting a location and then to ensure that I capture these to their best advantage with respect to distance, angle and lighting before getting diverted onto anything else.

Wildlife Workshops in Scotland

I have just returned from a ten day trip to Scotland to photograph some of the wildlife in the Cairngorms National Park.  The trip was in two parts, the first organised by Northshots and was guided by Chris Gomersall and Rob Jordan, and the second by Neil McIntyre of Scottish Wild Images, all established professionals in the area.  I can’t resist posting just one image from the trip, but see my website for more.

Technical details   :   Canon 1D MkIV + 500mm f/4 L IS lens   :   1/125sec at f/6.7 and ISO200

In addition to affording numerous opportunities to add images to my wildlife collection, I also managed to shoot some material relevant to TAOP which will doubtless appear over the course of the next few months. Additionally, I tried to revisit a number of aspects of the course so far, particularly exploring the role of shutter speed on moving water, as I had previously done in Exercise 4.  A rather more extreme approach was taken this time, with a 0.8 ND filter being used to reduce shutter speeds to 15 – 30 seconds to remove all definition from the water cascade and make it almost look like flowing ‘steam’.  The first image is a close up of the water cascading over rocks taken with a 15 second exposure.

A second shot I experimented with was with the river itself, again utilising the ND 0.8 filter to slow shutter speed, on this occasion to 20 seconds.

Technical details   :   Canon 1D MkIV + 70-200mm L IS lens at 163mm   :   15sec at f/16 and ISO100

Technical details   :   Canon 1D MkIV + 24-105mm L IS lens at 24mm   :   20sec at f/22 and ISO100

I have worked with Chris Gomersall a number of times in the past on bird photography workshops, and this photo tour happened to coincide with the release of his latest book "Wildlife Photographer", an excellent exploration of the more artistic and creative aspects of wildlife photography.  I've got a very long way to go ..... !!

So, that’s the end of the introductory ‘Getting to know your camera’ project then .. It’s been an interesting experience and one from which I have learned a lot.  Although I have experimented with the influence of aperture and shutter speed on the outcome of a shot many times before, it has always been within a fairly narrow zone around what I thought would be optimal for the shot I had in mind.  The exercises took me to a much wider spectrum of settings and I was surprised to see the appearance of some quite pleasing images at settings I would never have contemplated previously.  I shall especially experiment with some slower shutter speeds than I would normally consider as the course develops.

So, it’s onwards to ‘The Frame’ .....

A blog and a log ..

I’ve decided to keep a physical learning journal as well as the online blog.  The idea is not to replicate elsewhere what is here, but to give myself the chance to organise and develop ideas around some of the material that I have been collecting from events, magazines, online prints etc.  I envisage something of an annotated scrap book at the moment, but we’ll see how it goes .. Physical material from the events described in the next post will certainly go in there as a better home than trying to scan stuff and publish it in the online blog.

Some thoughts so far ...

Having completed some of the exercises and started to scope out ideas for the first ‘Contrasts’ assessment, I have been thoroughly enjoying myself ... even to the extent that I have been putting more energies into the course than into my wildlife photography.  It might take a back seat tomorrow as there is snow falling, and I’m not going to be able to resist that as far as photographing events outside goes!  Still, maybe I’ll even work a bird photo into the course somewhere, although I am trying not to revert to type too quickly!

I read through Michael Freeman’s ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ before I started the course, and over the last few days I have dipped back into it as far as the elements I have covered to date are concerned;  it makes at lot more sense to me now that I have physically done some of the things he discusses, especially around placement in the frame and depth and perspective.  As I go along, I’ll try and shoot a couple of sequences in a similar style to those used as examples in the book.  Rice farmers and salt panners are not that prevalent round here, but I’m sure the local area will have something to offer ..

I’ll even confess to moments of enlightenment .. as I’ve been looking round possible locations and considering ideas for later parts of the course I have actually started to see things in a different way – maybe I never looked before, and now that I have to be aware of opportunities for potential shots, I have actually started to spot elements of design, colour combinations, shapes, contrasts etc.  I really thought it would be difficult – after all, that’s ‘art’ isn’t it, and I don’t/can’t/won’t do art, but I seem to be spotting things all over the place.  Really surprised!

Blogging .. I’ve maintained a blog before, so the mechanics are familiar, although the more recent improvements to Blogger needed a little investigation.  The placement of photographs could do with being rather less random, as they do seem to move at will on occasions .. either that or I’ve missed something somewhere.  The ‘lightbox ’carousel option I like.

Missing opportunities to take shots for later elements of the course was something that concerned me, and there is no way I am going to remember all the requirements in the course folder.  So what I have done is scribble out a series of flow charts which give me a simple ‘one stop’ overview of what I’m supposed to be doing.  Here’s an example of the first part of the course running up to ‘Contrasts’ ..

So, overall a positive start on limited time.  Real work is not going to give me that many hours a week for the course, but I hope to keep up reasonable momentum and deliver the first assessment within a couple of months of setting out if I can.  I would certainly have liked to select some more ambitious subjects for the initial exercises, and hopefully as the days get longer, more options will start to open up for that.