The last assignment of the course. And very similar to Project 63, which could help. I need to go out with a bang. I’m afraid I’m more likely to be going out with a whimper. Illustration. Narrative. I don’t want it to be obvious. I don’t want it to be ordinary. I don’t want it to be unoriginal (a holiday?) I want it to be abstract. I want it to be unusual. I want it to be different. I want my final assignment to illustrate and narrate something that’s never been done before for a final assignment of the OCA’s TAoP.

It’s difficult. As I’ve mentioned before, I think, I have the ideas and then fail miserably to implement them successfully. And that is the most difficult thing: to make the end result match what you had it mind.

A theme that has a narrative element…

A definition of the word ‘narrative’… It can be a noun or an adjective. From an on-line dictionary: ‘a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious’ or ‘the art, technique, or process of narrating’ (noun); ‘consisting of or characterized by the telling of a story’ (adjective). I like the second noun definition. Probably because it has the words ‘art’, ‘technique’ and ‘process’ in it.

Subject matter? Or, perhaps, does the subject matter? Ha ha. And again as I’ve mentioned before: this work always takes so much longer than indicated in the courseware. At least if you want to do it properly. Or at least if I want to do it properly. I guess everything’s relative: my definition of properly might be totally different to yours; you might be able to do something ‘properly’ more quickly than me. So maybe ‘properly’ comes down to skill or talent: if you can do something ‘properly’ quicker than me you are more skilled, more talented than me. The courseware indicates 45 hours for this assignment: I’ve spent more than 45 hours just thinking about the assignment: I haven’t taken a single shot yet.

And talking about time and effort and doing things properly: I’ve just discovered from speaking to someone at the OCA that if you intend on being assessed for a degree, and I do, the it’s only the last, level  courses that are taken into account on deciding the class of degree that you attain. So I guess I could have spent less time on these early courses, got them out of the way, and then spent more time and effort on the final couple of level 3 courses. But I can’t as that goes against the grain.

So back to a theme… What about… Ironing a shirt? Frying an egg? Eating said egg? Drinking a glass of wine? Eating an apple? Have these ever been done before? Are they suitable? I think they COULD be. COULD anything that involves the element of time be suitable? Is everything a story? Is everything that has a timeline as story? Writing this? Thinking about the assignment? So it’s just about ILLUSTRATING the eating of the apple, the ironing of the shirt.

And then in a flash of… well… I’m not at all sure if it’s inspiration… I got invited to a wedding and ended up with these images.

(I wasn’t the official photographer. I wonder if I could stand the stress: perhaps it’s not as stressful as it used to be – waiting for rolls of film to come back from the lab with/without images – but still… I remember my father as a wedding photographer many years ago. Very stressful. For the whole family! And I don’t, of course, mean the family of the bride, or of the groom).

(I was supposed to use between 7 and 13 images for this (final: yes!) assignment, but I’m afraid I’ve gone over by one image. I couldn’t even think of a single image, and now I’ve got too many. Ah well.)

(Plus, of course, there’s nothing original about this set of images: a wedding! I ask you! Original? Ha! Abstract? Yeah, right! An unusual treatment? No chance! As if no one’s ever taken a photograph at a wedding before! I guess there are a couple of nice shots in there.)

A wedding story. Title: ‘The Right Decision’. At the time, of course, it always is (isn’t it?). You just hope that it always will be.

The cover image.

An image taken out of the narrative, of course, and converted to black and white. This image works well on its own, with the absence of colour (my favourite colour) adding to the drama of the occasion. Is it black and white? Is the decision to get married the right one? Is it always clear-cut?

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

The picture essay.

1st image.

The groom uncertain: but only about the choice of music, or the ability of the person playing the music.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

2nd image.

The clergyman with a hint of ‘celibacy is definitely wrong’ look in his eye!

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

3rd image.

The official photographer. I’m not so keen on the angle he’s shooting from!

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

4th image.

No doubt: the right decision!

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

5th image.

The 1st few steps on married life’s road.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

6th image.

The bride and groom: hoping every day will feel like this. But perhaps hoping for very different reasons.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

7th image.

The groom’s parents remembering their wedding day and how it made them feel, and how the memory is making them feel now. Do they still feel that way, without that memory?

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

8th image.

There could be perhaps a hint of uncertainty here. No! Just a little more contemplative, a little more serious. But it’s still the right decision.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

9th image.

The obvious symbolism of the doves. Peace. Which there always will be, of course, as we’ve made the right decision!

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

10th image.

Very subtle. A hint of perhaps something else in this image which is absent from the others (except for the obviousness of the fireworks going off in the final image!)

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

11th image.

All the guests are letting balloons go here, but only the 2 most important people at the wedding are in shot.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

12th image.

A little time alone for the bride and groom even though there are hundreds of guests around them at the reception.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

13th image.

That 1st all-important dance.

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

14th image.

Off to the honeymoon. Off to the fireworks!

Assignment 5: illustration/narrative

The images above are in a timeline, of course (excepting the first, cover, image). I’ve no idea whether or not I will have any control over where the images will be placed within the magazine, although they should be in the above order: it would make little sense to print them out of sequence. Having said that, however, I can’t know if 2 images are going to be printed side-by-side, on pages 2 and 3 for example, or if they are going to be printed vertically as a pair on a page, so the phrase in the courseware ‘sometimes the juxtaposition of 2 appropriate images can be telling’ is meaningless in this context: I’m not going to know whether or not 2 of my appropriate images will be juxtaposed. I would like to have the 7th and 8th images juxtaposed, for example, or the 13th and 14th ones, but have I got that amount of control over the layout of the magazine?

Click this link for bigger images.

Millet's 'The Gleaners'

A bit of Realism. A bit of fabulous Realism. Look at the texture, the lighting, the colour, the composition. Everythin about this image is wonderful. If I could reproduce this photographically, I would be very pleased, to say the least. And perhaps even consider the photograph to be a work of art. Phew! So at last, perhaps: PHOTOGRAPHY IS ART!

Picasso’s ‘ The Kiss’

Picasso - The Kiss

Watteau’s ‘The Faux Pas’

Watteau - The Faux Pas

Strang’s ‘Bank Holiday’

Strang - The Bank Holiday

Turner’s ‘Rain, steam and speed’

Turner - Rain, steam, speed

These images are undoubtedly Art. Would the same scenes photographed be considered Art? I suspect not. Two people kissing? Picasso’s use of typically unconventional techinque such as the multiple perspectives here is what makes it. An unconventional photograph wouldn’t be as striking, unless I could somehow make it orginally unconventional. What about a similar photograph from multiple perspectives? Would that be a bit like Hockney’s ‘joiners’?  A photograph of a faux pas as Art? It’s the staging, the technique, the sense of voyeurism. If I could get that feeling across in a photograph, then maybe… A waiter and 2 customers ordering lunch or whatever on a bank holiday? How could I convince anyone that a photograph of this event be described as Art? A photographic equivalent of the Turner? Perhaps my favourite of the 4 images. A brilliant landscape. I’ve seen some good low-light landscape photography stuff, some good landscape HDR photography, but nothing as impressive, as striking, as exhilirating as this. Photography is not this kind of Art. And still the question remains: is photography any kind of Art?

Haven’t we already done a rain project? Yes, it was Project 50. So, 17 projects later, here’s my single image that, I hope, ‘leaves no doubt about the subject’.

Project 67: rain

The first thing I had to go, of course perhaps, was to find out what the word ‘juxtaposition’ actually means. The simple definition is ‘put side by side’ (this from ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Current English’ which I bought for £2.50 more than 20 years ago). I don’t know why I used the word simple: perhaps because I thought there was something more to ‘juxtapose’ than that. So off I went to the internet, to dictionary.com, or thefreedictionary.com, or whatever. And here I found the addition of the phrase ‘often for comparison’. Which seemed to make it a much bigger word somehow.

And this is what I came up with…

Project 66: juxtaposition

Hmmmm, I hear you saying. It took ages! Ages? you ask. That took ages?! Well the objects are juxtaposed; they’re side-by-side for comparison (a natural product and a man-made one). And the piece of resistance – check out the number on the calculator…

Apparently I should try to avoid cliché. But cliché is to some extent a matter of opinion. And also, I could treat it in an original or interesting way. And then perhaps it would still be cliché, but it would at least be an interesting cliché. All of the ideas – below – are clichés, but I will treat them in an interesting way: lighting, composition, some abstraction. And in that way I might be able to go beyond cliché.

Symbols for growth: a sprouting seedling (oh dear: already desperate! Perhaps done very close up (macro) to bring out the texture of the new shoot contrasted with the soil the seedling is sprouting from, and lit in some incredibly original, interesting way (how? no idea!)) A buddha. Spiritual growth and development. Is that a bit more interesting than a sprouting seedling?

Symbols for excess: a shot of an interior Specsavers wall. There are hundreds and hundreds of different frames, but still I can’t find what I’m looking for! Perhaps it would be better if there were just half a dozen to choose from. Is it this excess of choice that causes the problem? Let’s go for the cliché jugular: calorie consumption. Calorie consumption in the (so-called) western world. Or just consumption generally. Which I guess could be regarded as being less ‘political’. Or the spectre of in-built obsolescence: a bit of the next project here as I juxtapose an image of an xth generation iPod with a yth generation. What’s the difference? Nothing! Except maybe a functionally meaningless revamp of the navigation system, or an increase in the amount of disk space so you’ll have even more space you’re not going to use!

Symbols for crime: another bit of juxtaposition here with an image of a John Lewis home/kitchen department filled with gadgets side-by-side with an image of some inner-city estate kitchen that might have too little crockery and cutlery. Neither of these images singly illustrate crime, of course, but it is a crime that such a contrast exists. Or, night-time, a speeding police car, beacons flashing, slow shutter and trails of light but still recognisable.

Symbols for silence: an empty church, light streaming through stained glass windows; very silent and celestial. A young child shushing someone, an index finger or perhaps some other finger, pressed against her/his lips.

Symbols for poverty: something clichéd? Something abstract? A group of poor people. A begging child. A starving child. A slum. Or the abstract: how to illustrate a paucity of ideas?

Project 64: evidence of action

Obvious evidence of action, I guess. With a bit of colour stuff thrown in there, as well. Bit of primary colour stuff – red, yellow, blue. How to make the obvious a little less obvious? A little less conservative? With a lower case c, or an UPPER CASE C? (I’ve been attending a local camera club since I joined last September and one of the most disappointing things about it is the utter conservative-ness of 95% of the images show, whether they be print or projected. I enter images into various competitions – both print and projected – almost purely in an attempt to make these people go ‘Oooooh!’ My image of pavement dog shit didn’t go down too well. Or it went down very well. It depends how you look at things, I guess. And I guess there’s more than one way of looking at dog shit…)

Anyway, that’s another digression out of the way…

So how to make the obvious less obvious… How to abstract… the image above is something of an attempt…

Nah… On second thoughts, it’s not really abstract at all, it is? How could I even think I could get away with describing it as abstract when it’s the whole thing! I need a macro lens, that’s what I need. My next purchase sorted. Now all I need to do is save up…

Maybe I should have switched the pencils/shavings around so that yellow shavings were next to red, blue was next to yellow and red was next to blue. I’d then end up with secondary colours from the mix-up, wouldn’t I?! Bit late now though.

I like that phrase ‘some actual photography’!

Now there’s a somewhat condescending phrase – “something as simple as the preparation of food”! Tell that to those guys who just took part in the final of Masterchef! Simple?! Simple?! You must be joking! Works of art, that’s what those ‘simply-prepared’ meals were.

Check out these pictures —>>>

Here’s the starter…

Masterchef 2010 Winner Starter

Here’s the main course…

Masterchef 2010 Winner Main Course

Here’s the dessert…

Masterchef 2010 Winner Dessert

Now don’t try to tell me these dishes were simple to prepare.

So what about my own narrative picture essay consisting of between 5 and 15 photographs?

I was going to do something as simple as cooking, but I’m thinking I’ll leave that until the final assignment of the course and use it for that, but make it a real challenge to finish off with: it certainly won’t be simple, that’s really not something I want. So, what to do instead…

I could do the football thing researched and planned in the previous project, or think of something completely different… Something like totally abstract, something like really off the wall…

Ummm…

What about this…

The 1st image: a view of the challenge.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 2nd image: the first tentative steps.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 3rd image: into the darkness; fear.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 4th image: it’s certainly not getting any easier.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 6th image: hold on tight; time for a breather.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 6th image: still no easier; totally disorientated.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 7th image: a grab for a post.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 8th image: more than halfway now; suddenly feeling more confident.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 9th image: but still holding on tight.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 10th image: bright light helping; a contrast to the earlier darkness.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 11th image: not long to go now, but still holding firmly on.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 12th image: getting more and more confident as the project comes to an end.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 13th image: fairly sure I’m not going to get unlucky now.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

The 14th image: success, with one foot back on solid ground. And perhaps that’s all you can expect in life…

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

Does that meet the project ‘criteria’? It tells a story, happening over time, in a series of images. Therefore, I guess, it is a narrative picture essay, isn’t it?

The phrase ‘trying too hard’ comes to mind. But it’s somehow a difficult phrase to justify: I might get laughed at for using that phrase in the context of this project: how on earth can the above possibly be described as ‘trying too hard’?!

Other notes about this project…

I have certainly chosen what might be regarded as ‘a homely subject’ (of course you don’t just walk down the stairs at home… Work, department store, football ground…) Have I made walking down the stairs ‘interesting, attractive and varied’? Interesting? Although it is a homely suject, it is, I think, an interesting choice: as I said earlier, I wanted to do something that was a bit different somehow. So combining homely with, I hope, a choice of topic that’s never been covered before in the history of Project 63 for the OCA’s TAoP course, has made it interesting. Attractive? The shots were taken at about 5pm on a sunny spring day, which you might just be able to see from the 5th image. The light was coming directly through a frosted window above and just out of sight of the 1st image and softened further by the wooden banister, the carpet and the yellow/brown/orange walls. Soft, pastel-y (?!), desaturated light has made for an attractive setting. Varied? Some wide-angle shots, some close-ups, half-half feet/leg and hand/arm, some high contrast images, some low and different perspectives. That’s varied, isn’t it?

(This is another one of those projects where the suggested time is such an underestimate: it’s becoming assignment-length!)

So now I’m trying to decide how to put the images together. I’ve done all the photography stuff – the lighting, composition, etc (all the interesting/attractive/varied stuff mentioned above) – and now I’ve got to get involved in the page layout!

OK. So this is the way I’m going to lay the images out: vertically (going DOWN the stairs), in one column (which I think won’t go down well as the arrangement will take up lots of space), matching the width of the ‘landscape’ images to the width of the ‘portrait’ ones. I’m going to create a vertical panaroma, with no space between the images, and put it in here. I think I can do that in Irfan View. I’ll get back to you on that…

And here it is. I ended up doing it in PowerPoint. Bit time-consuming, to say the least. It’s difficult to get the full effect (full effect!) having to scroll a lot vertically. It might be quite effective as a tall poster print.

Project 63: a narrative picture essay

I’ve just read through the course notes for this project again and noticed it states, towards the end, ‘write a short caption under each picture, describing what it shows’. As the (paraphrased) saying goes, a picture tells more than a short caption, but I’m going to pop back and caption my images…

Next weekend my 11-year old son is playing in a football cup final for the second year running. I took some photos of the occasion last year; they were OK, but after doing this course and researching the event, they are going to be so much better this year!

I’ve looked through the photographs I took last year and this gives me a good idea of the extra reserach that needs to be done to create a set of images that will improve of last year’s effort.

The ground is local so not much travel involved: I can walk to the ground so very easy to re-visit if I need to. The match starts at 10am so I don’t need to get up at the crack of dawn! I’ve spoken to the groundsman (he says he remembers me from last year, which I’m a bit dubious about); he’ll give me a luminous green vest with ‘official photographer’ or something like that on the back. Very professional! I’ll be allowed to wander around the ground and I can go pitch-side to take photographs. The only place I can’t take photos is in the changing rooms, which makes sense. I’ve asked if I can take pictures in an empty changing room and that’s OK: would really like a few shots of an empty ground – an empty changing room and an empty stand, for example. Good for contrast. Unfortunately I won’t be able to contrast empty/busy chaging rooms, but never mind.

Last year I did no research on the layout of the ground, for example, but now I’ve been around checking out the layout of the place, particuarly in relation to the position of the sun – where’s best for light, of course. Checked out car parks, entrance to ground, turnstiles, the stand, the pitch itself. What else? When the ground opens for spectators; refreshments area; the length of the match; how long for half-time; where the players come out onto the pitch; where trophies get awarded.

The kind of equipment I’ll take… I’ll be shooting RAW, of course. I’ll be talking 2 4GB cards and 1 2GB card (fast film is mentioned in the courseware: yet another example of it’s dated-ness!); tripod/monopod (I found my monopod (however cheap and nasty – fiver from 7dayshop!) very useful for pitch-side shots last year. And I remember looking at the official match photographer’s equipment – for example, several bodies, a 300mm Canon L-series prime lens – with envy! What? Perhaps 2 grand just for the lens?! And there’s me with my…); my 17-85 and my 70-300.

A list of the photos I’ll take… (to be updated spontaneously on the day):

Emptiness – empty car park, empty ground, empty stand, empty dressing rooms, spectator-free turnstiles.
Starting to get busy – cars, buses arriving, spectators milling around, going through turnstiles.
Our boys – nervous, excited, chatting (can we do better than last year? They were runners-up)
Things starting to happen – stand filling up, people getting teas/coffees from a refreshments van, people drinking teas/coffees.
Almost time for kick-off – the 2 teams running out on to the pitch, team photos, tossing a coin, captains shaking hands, the whistle blows!
And then it’s going to be rather spontaneous! The pictures I would expect to take? Unplannable! Good ones? My son scoring a goal?! Spectators cheering.
Half-time – coach talking to boys, encouragement, drinking water.
Second half – same as for 1st half!
Final whistle – perhaps end of normal time, so extra time, and then perhaps penalties (that’s what happened last year).
Presentation ceremony – last year Peter Shilton gave out the trophies/medals.
More photos – team, individual, happy faces, sad faces.

Types of photo – wide, tele, close-up, long, portrait, landscape.

Wish us luck!

I would guess that the majority of the photographs I have taken over the years have been using natural light, so it will be interesting to see how I’ll cope with using various other lighting techniques – but also perhaps natural light – to reveal the various properties of an object. Which kind of light will be best at revealing a particular property? Will fluorescent light reveal texture more than natural light? Is it more dependent on the property rather than the light? Is daylight better for colour? Is flash good for texture? Is artificial light of any kind better at revealing a particular property? Are there any absolutes as far as a kind of light and a particular property are concerned? Or is the point to experiment, to try things out?

I think perhaps everything has the various properties that this assignment is all about and everything can be photographed in a variety of different lighting conditions. The problem is to choose an object which has obvious shape, form, texture and colour and which can be lit to clearly illustrate these properties.

And what kind of constraint can I put on myself, my choice of object, for this assignment?

There are a variety of souvenirs around the house that have been picked up on travels over the last 20-odd years – some dating back to travelling through Asia in the mid-eighties and others from more recent travels, like Portugal last year, for example. I’m not sure which,  but I think one of them would be good for this assignment.

As I implied above, the choice of object is crucial.

A close look at 2 or 3 of the objects under different lighting conditions reveals that, as is pretty obvious, I guess, some properties are more obvious than others. The shape of any of the objects can be easily revealed by a silhouette under whatever light, whereas the texture is not so easily revealed under whatever light. So: it’s easy to reveal the shape property, far less so the texture property.

I spent a couple of days shooting each of my chosen objects from every possible angle, in every kind light. (So good to have a digital camera: I would have binned 15 rolls of film or more by now just on this assignment alone.)

The problem is that I can’t get a single object to illustrate all the properties with the different kinds of light. For example: I can flash one of the objects to well-illustrate shape, another of the objects in natural light well-illustrates texture, and so on. Not good. Back to the shelf to choose a different object. (A loaf of bread has been recommended: an easy subject that lots of people choose, apparently. But who wants an easy subject that lots of people thave chosen?!) A buddha, from India, I think; this might be the one. It seems somehow unfortunate – that it is so central to the assignment, that the choice of object is so important. What if I was a pro, on some photographic commission, and had to photograph some object, some work of art, perhaps. I couldn’t really say, Oh no, I can’t photograph that, I can’t reveal the texture, can I photograph something else please?

I’ve been re-reading parts of Itten’s “Design and Form”. A part of the texture section has a list of different materials – bark, fur, metal, stone – all different textures on different objects (likely, of course). Also, the texture of wood/bark can be felt, it’s rough, it has a strong 3-D property, generally; it’s the ‘conversion’ to 2-D in a photograph that is a problem.

I mentioned earlier that perhaps it seems a shame that the choice of object is more important than the photography. Of course, I need to be able to, my photography needs to be good enough to convey a 3-D property in a 2-D image, to convey a ‘feeling’, a property, an atmosphere via a photograph.

And then my mind wanders. I think about the difference/similarity between an image and a photograph or, perhaps more accurately, the difference/similarity between the the 2 words image and photograph. And that of course they are not synonyms. I use my camera to take a photograph and then the image develops from it, via the darkroom, digital, thankfully! Cropping, under-/over-exposure, etc. etc. Or that actually there’s a step before taking the photograph that I have missed out: having an idea! The idea is how I would like (would want) the image to turn out. So I take a photograph with this idea/image in mind. Then I look at the photograph and see that it’s not quite (not at all) what I had in mind. (Does the photograph ever meet expectations? Does the photograph ever really match the image you had in mind?) So I manipulate the photograph and hopefully end up with something a little closer to what I had in mind. So it goes something like this:-

A legend might go something like 1 and 2 are pressing the shutter and doing a bit of manipulation and 3 is the skill in getting the image to look like the idea that I had in mind originally.

Or as I’m working in my digital darkroom I have other ideas – for better or worse – and start moving away from my original idea. Not necessarily a good/bad thing: I could say at least the idea has developed. And then I think it doesn’t matter whether the ‘change’ in the image is good or bad, the skill lies in being able to produce ‘the original intention’. And then I think this – this digression – is getting just a little, or very, pretentious.

Back to Itten… There’s an interesting line regarding interpretation/imitation. He says that the material/texture part of the program was meant to be interpretive rather than imitative. However, I feel that this assignment is asking me to imitate the texture of my chosen subject. Surely the more accurate my imitation the better I have succeeded. ‘Oh yes, he’s really captured the texture of that surface’.

That’s enough digression for the time being. Although…

I think shape’s going to be the easiest property to convey (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but please note that some of my blog text is transcribed from notes I’ve scribbled the old-fashioned way, i.e. yes! I write things down!) With shape it doesn’t really matter that much what the lighting conditions are: a silhouette is a silhouette, backlit by a torch, or candlelight, or sunlight. Texture is going to be the most difficult. Form? Colour?

The shape of an object is perhaps it’s most obvious property or characteristic. But form? It’s back to an object’s 3-D quality, but conveying that property using a 2-D image. I need to play around with light to get a good combination of light/shadow. Could any kind of light bring out the form of an object? My chosen object has obvious form, although that doesn’t mean to say I’m going to be able to convey it easily.

OK. This has been like some kind of essay so far. I need to get in to the practical side. Although I do enjoy this potentially pretentious theorizing! And I do feel it helps.

Outside, in garden, moving from bright sun to  dark shadow; moving from open space to space enclosed by trees and bushes. Green grass and green leaves affecting the colour of my object. I haven’t mentioned colour yet: the object I have chosen has a very different colour front/back which perhaps I can use somehow.) Moved inside; experimenting with daylight in the house, in different parts of the house. (The colour of the object again being influenced by the colours around the object.) Night-time and now a chance to experiment with artificial light (although I guess I could experiment with mixtures of light. But perhaps that should be a constraint for this assignment: one kind of light – fluorescent or daylight, for example, but not both. How complex would that make it re temperature/white balance etc?)

It’s all just experimentation at the moment, inside and outside, with very different kinds of light: changing the position of the light, the kind of light, the position/angle from which the object is photographed. And it’s another one of these amazing things about digital photography: just imagine having to make a note of exposure readings – this shutter speed at that aperture – and so on (even the focal length!), when all I have to do is check the exif data. Fantastic!

Downloading images to PC, organizing my image library (all done in Lightroom) and trawling my way through hundreds of image. Still not sure whether I’ve got my workflow optimised, but the 1st part is always to get rid of the rubbish (well that’s 95% gone! Ha ha!) Event that’s hard for me (you should see my loft!): however bad an image maybe it could be used for some future assignment or project.

As I look through my images it sometimes feels as if I’m working backwards here – that I’m looking at an image and saying Yes that was taken in diffuse daylight and it illustrates well the form of my object. This seems somehow the wrong way round. Does that make sense? Some of my images are OK, but still I wonder if my choice of object is wrong.

I’ve got 8 images together which, I think, just about do the job, but I’m not particularly happy with them. As I’ve done with all my assignments, I’ll upload them to some personal web space I have and wait for feedback from my tutor. (That’s another great thing about this new way of doing things, all this new technology: I don’t have to send hard copies to my tutor, get them assessed, re-submit with suggested changes and on and on. Well, I do, but I submit soft copies, I upload altered images, or brand new images, instantaneously. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a luddite, but I’d be a pretty crap one!)

I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s having difficulty with this assignment! Excellent suggestion from tutor – to consider de-saturating my ‘form’ images and thus concentrate more on that particular property and not be distracted by the colour of the object. Another suggestion is to use more variety as far as the angle/position of the object is concerned. Certainly a valid point: my images do look rather static as they are all either side- or front-on at present. (Almost right) back to the drawing board… Something else I hadn’t considered before is to use a different background colour: I’ve used only white so far. Perhaps worth considering.

So something I try to avoid as much as possible: more manipulation is creeping into my work. I de-saturated my ‘form’ images and that has improved the assignment. I’m not completely convinced it has made a great deal of difference to how much more ‘of the object’s form it has revealed, but I think it has had a positive effect on the set of assignment images as a whole: the set is more dynamic. And de-saturation is not really  that manipulative.

I have finally put together a set of images that I think do illustrate the 4 properties: shape, form, texture and colour.

Originally I thought of this assignment as boring or, perhaps, uninteresting. It felt a little like an ‘I guess it has to be done’ experience. But then on second (third and fourth) thoughts, that seemed unfair. Yes, it does have to be done; it has to be studied, so it was a valuable experience and it has, like the course generally, made me look and think. Light and the fundamental properties of each and every object. So important!

Below are my final 8 assignment 4 images, each with a short note indicating lighting conditions.

Shape

Shape 1

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: cloudless late afternoon sun, object silhouetted side-on.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Shape 2

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: halogen spotlight from behind diffused through 80 gsm white paper.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Form

Form 1

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: outdoors, midday, overcast, diffuse light.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Form 2

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: early morning, cloudy day, indoors; object placed on windowsill with daylight – from right – diffused with greaseproof paper plus added halogen spotlight – from left – diffused with 80 gsm white paper.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Texture

Texture 1

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: sunny day, indoors (in living room furnished with variety of colours).

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Texture 2

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: halogen spotlight from slight angle diffused through greaseproof paper.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Colour

Colour 1

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: daylight, early morning, light cloud.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

Colour 2

LIGHTING CONDITIONS: rear of object to illustrate very different colour to front. Indoors, late morning, light cloud, fill-in flash.

Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques

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