Technical and Visual Skills

Aspect Ratios – In response to Adams’ Summer Nights Walking (ASX, 2010), I shot an earlier exercise in square format.  I was hoping to achieve a focus on the key subject of the image and I found that this worked for the exercise but not so well for this assignment where I found it too cramped.  I decided to go slightly wider and adopted a 5:4 format.  I found that this worked well as it allowed me to gain the tightness of framing to support the viewer’s focus, much tighter than the 3:2 standard of my camera.  I chose to capture in this ratio rather than rely on post-capture editing and I found that this worked well as it meant I could see the image at capture time and achieve better framing.  

Group Editing – This assignment was designed to be viewed as a set.  The images displayed in a grid format as shown on the draft assignment almost creates a new image in itself.  To that end, I edited the images in lightroom in a grid format looking at all the images at the same time.  I have not done this before, previously I would have edited each image singularly and then accepted differences between them.  Here, by editing as a whole I think I have achieved a greater consistency and that this has added to the cohesiveness of the set.

Spotting images – Visually, to find these images took considerable attention to detail as I walked the valley.  In particular, I find myself looking at isolated details and visualising them in a captured frame.  This is quite different to the broader general perspective I would normally take looking at more classical picturesque views.  I now find myself continuing looking in this way as I do other walks, the assignment has changed the way I am looking at the world and I think it will improve my photography.

Quality of Outcome

Consistency of the edit – For me, this consistency is a new development in my photography practice.  My initial idea was to capture my journey walking through the valley.  This resulted in a variety of image types – buildings glimpsed through trees, fences, gates (which I was seeing as markers along my journey), and other traces of man.  After researching Hugo’s Permanent Error (Hugo, 2010), Burtynsky’s Oil (Photographs — Edward Burtynsky, n.d.), and Watson’s Sounding of the Estuary (Watson, n.d.) I had thought that a mixture of images would work.  I did create an image set that contained a variety of those images but I found that the variety actually detracted from the image set itself, the set did not gel as a whole, and that the content of the images pulled my attention away from others in the set rather than complement them.  I think this is because the images although different were too similar.  In all of my examples above, whilst they do contain a mixture of images, there are typically only three types of images in the set and the three types are quite different.  My images although being different in subject, gates versus fences for example, they were showing the same thing, nature taking over.  My research of Baltz (Beshty, Stahel and Campany, 2017:97) who has produced a large number of typography sets influenced me the most to change my approach; in his sets, the typology is much stronger.  In response to this, using lightroom I created a number of different sets, one for each type.  I found the fences to be the strongest set and so chose that as my assignment. 

To order the images I created physical images and laid them out on the floor.  In doing this I ended up with a different order to when seen on the screen and also swapped some images as they did not fit within the set when seen that way.  My finished set, I think, is well balanced in terms of mixture of images within the set whilst still creating a cohesive whole.  

Demonstration of Creativity

I think the combination of technical and visuals skills with the research led approach to shot selection and set selection has created quite a creative set.  If I had set out with the mindset of “ok I am going to take pictures of fences” then I would not have finished with the set I did.  In fact, I came across a different student’s blog who did just that in response to the reading the chapter Wires from Edgelands (Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S., 2011), but ended up with something very different and discarded it.  I think that my Artists Statement helped me considerably, it gave me a reason for shot capture and selection beyond aesthetics, this is a technique I will use again.  

My greatest learning here is related to the sense of purpose all of the way through the assignment.  Perhaps I thought creativity was about seeing a single shot in a different way to others.  I have learned that it spans all aspects of the process from idea, through capture and editing, to publication, including research to develop my thinking.  I think I might have argued previously that only the image capture part of the process was the creative part, and also that the very deliberate end to end process was anything but creative, mechanistic perhaps.  I now have a very different view and so have learned the importance of considering all aspects of my practice within my creative thinking. 

Context

My research has influenced me greatly in this assignment.

• Typography.  I was initially interested in Shore’s Uncommon Places (Shore, 1973) and the way he used three or four framing approaches for all of the images in his collection, also when looking at his book, the way in which a rhythm is established through the set.  This research took me to Hugo’s Permanent Error (Hugo, 2010), Burtynsky’s Oil (Photographs — Edward Burtynsky, n.d.), and Watson’s Sounding of the Estuary (Watson, n.d.) which let me see how they have created their typographies with mixed images.  Ultimately I wanted to focus on one type of image only, a much stronger typography and it was Baltz’s work that let me see the power that this can achieve in the set and how, when done, each image adds strength to the others in the set.  I saw this for example in his Nevada 1977 set (Beshty, Stahel and Campany, 2017:97).

• Format. Adams’ Summer Nights Walking (ASX, 2010) led me to think about image format, in terms of ratios.  His images use a square format and I found that this generates an intensity and focus on the core subject.  I found this too constrained for my assignment but I did experiment with 5:4 format rather than the native 3:2 of my camera and I found that it achieved a more focussed outcome than the native format so stuck with it.

Bibliography

ASX, E., 2010. Robert Adams -“Summer Nights Walking” (2009). [online] AMERICAN SUBURB X. Available at: <https://americansuburbx.com/2010/04/robert-adams-summer-nights-walking-2009.html> [Accessed 6 February 2021]

Hugo, P., 2010. PERMANENT ERROR — Pieter Hugo. [online] Pieterhugo.com. Available at: <https://pieterhugo.com/PERMANENT-ERROR> [Accessed 15 February 2021]

Burtynsky, E., n.d. Photographs: Oil — Edward Burtynsky. [online] Edward Burtynsky. Available at: <https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/oil> [Accessed 22 February 2021]

Watson, F., n.d. Soundings from the Estuary – Frank Watson. [online] Frankwatsonphotography.com. Available at: <https://frankwatsonphotography.com/soundings-from-the-estuary/> [Accessed 15 February 2021].

Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S. (2011) Edgelands, Journeys into England’s True Wilderness.

Shore, S., 1973. Stephen Shore – Uncommon Places. [online] Stephenshore.net. Available at: <http://stephenshore.net/photographs/uncommon/index.php?page=1&menu=photographs> [Accessed 30 January 2021].

Beshty, W., Stahel, U. and Campany, D., 2017. Lewis Baltz. Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE.