A Summary of My Thoughts Concerning Assignment 2 – Landscape
I found this to be a very challenging assignment but I felt I also learnt a lot; especially concerning creative landscapes. This was inspired mostly by Georges Rousse, with his whole oeuvre, as well as Richard T. Walker, with his ‘us through this‘ (2013) series of photographs. While my ‘destination shots’ (Photographs 8, 9 and 10 – Assignment 2 – Landscape) were certainly not as precise as Rousse’s and Walker’s, I thought they were precise enough for the illusion of ‘looking through’ the body as a kind of ‘window of the soul’ to be quite apparent. If I were to improve this project this might be one of the key areas I looked towards, so that the precision of the extraneous lines matched up better as described in my Photographs 8, 9 and 10 post.
These 3 shots: Photographs 8, 9 and 10, in my opinion were quite topical in that they also addressed the phenomena of the ‘selfie’ shot, although in what I thought was quite a unique way, mainly because of the illusion.
In a lot of the other shots for this assignment, I decided to employ long exposures to convey movement and I thought this was most successful where I captured people moving in multitude. This, I decided was due to these shots managing to connate the idea of a journey of many people; not just one, which I felt was an added feature of Photographs 5, 6 and 7 particularly.
I discovered I often went to my 10 stop neutral density filter for long exposures during the daytime, as it allowed me to create long exposures, which weren’t too long or short. I could ‘fine tune’ the shutter speeds of each long exposure by adjusting aperture and/or ISO accordingly so I had a degree of control over how blurred I wanted the people or trails to appear.
I noticed with this project the compositions were quite ‘forced’ upon me, where there was usually only one or two vantage points, which “would give the best view”’ – (Watkins, (1858) In. Encyclopedia Britannica, (2013) for the kind of angle I was after. In future projects I would perhaps begin projects with more choice compositionally at my disposal, although I was quite satisfied with my eventual viewpoints.
My photographs for Assignment 2 – ‘A Journey’ were mostly pictorial in nature, because of the moving elements present, which ranged from people to car trails to trains. One in particular: Photograph 1, was very pictorial and so was a large departure from the picturesque techniques I had largely used in Assignment 1.
Altogether, the project had a lot of variety in my opinion and importantly, a sense of progression could be observed, by me at least, of a journey that reached a conclusion with the ‘destination’ photographs at the end. If I were to improve the project further, I would address the issues in precision in the ‘destination’ photographs (8,9 and 10).
References:
Rousse, G. (2003). Rüsselsheim 2003. [Photograph] Available at: http://www.georgesrousse.com/en/archives/article/georges-rousse-in-ruesselsheim/ [Accessed 24 Jun. 2015].
Walker, R. (2013). us through this. [Photograph] Available at: http://www.richardtwalker.net/us-through-this [Accessed 24 Jun. 2015].
Watkins, C. (1858) In. Encyclopedia Britannica. (2013). Carleton E. Watkins | American photographer. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carleton-E-Watkins [Accessed 24 Jun. 2015].