During the St Malo trip my small group completed a number of activities that we photographed and filmed. These photo’s are very happy photo’s that include a lot of energy and are a good representative of our activities from the day.

Here is a contact sheet contacting the photo’s I took from the day. The majority of these photo’s are from the afternoon session which we spent on the beach. On the beach we met two boy’s who had set up a tightrope, I asked if i could take some photo’s of what they were doing and them performing some tricks. I also had a go on the rope myself- which fits in with the theme of ‘Chance, change & Challenge’. We also played a big game of bulldog on the beach with some American people we met, whilst playing this game I also took photo’s   throughout the game.

The rest of the photo’s are from around the street’s of St Malo and photo’s captured during our experiments.

The first time we met Tom Pope was at the Jersey Societe, This is when he talked about  his work and his interests. His interests that he injects into his work is; Humor, chance, repetition ect… After talking about this he took us to an outdoor space where we completed three task.

The Orange Task

We were paired up and were told to get an orange. We had to throw these oranges to one another, whilst holding the camera in the other hand and capturing the orange in the air. The steps to setting up for this task, was firstly setting the camera to the appropriate parameters. We also turned the flash on. Secondly we placed the orange on the floor and focused our camera onto the orange- we did this so the orange would be in focus in the photograph. Then finally we rapped the strap of the camera around the opposite hand to our throwing hand. These are the photos I got from this activity.

The Selfie Task

This task was also a pairs task and the aim of the game was to take picture of your partner but not let them take pictures of you. Here are my photographs from this task.

Choreographing

The third task we were asked to complete was where we gathered into groups of fives, and each one of us write down an action of a piece of paper. For example a cartwheel. We all had to complete all of these actions whilst taking a photograph at the same time. Here are some of the photo’s from this shoot.

I think that these three photoshoots were really helpful for me to have an insight into the type of photography we were needing to achieve on the St Malo trip. Even though the photographs were not of great quality, the purpose behind them shows the element of fun, and chance. I think that these shoots helped encourage my idea’s for the France trip, and helped make the France trip as successful as it was.

This experiment was made because we wanted to look at how different people would interact with the setup. From discussing this idea/plan with the two people who were observing with me; Hayli and Claudia; We thought that there could only be four outcomes:
1. Person(s) walk directly past without noticing.
2. Person(s) walk over, read the sign, and walk away.
3. Person(s) walk over, read the sign, pick up the camera without taking a photo, put down the camera and walk away.
4. Person(s) walk over, read the sign, pick up the camera, take a photo with the camera, and then put the camera down and walk away.

The sign we left, said in french (we hope, although Google translate isn’t the most accurate) Hello! We are Jersey Photography students, and we would like your help for a project. Please could you take a photo using our camera. Please do not move or remove the camera. Thank you 🙂 We then later added another sign above with slightly bigger writing which said, Please can you take a photo, thank you. Have a good day.

Within our Lunch hour we ate at a cafe/restaurant which was only a couple of metres away from the tree where we had placed the camera, so that we would be able to observe how people were interacting with it. The most common of our four expected outcomes were numbers 1 and 2, which was what we had expected. We were slightly surprised by just how many people spent a minute or two reading the sign, to then shrug it off and walk away. We thought this might be down to:
a) people not being used to this kind of thing and so being slightly suspicious of it;
b) not wanting to be seen doing this thing which is slightly odd;
c) if they were alone, not wanting to seem lonely to us, the anonymous students;
d) not being able to understand the atrocious French on the sign.

We did however, get a couple of people who acted differently to how we’d predicted.

First there was a teenager who was in a group, who first took a photo of himself, and then got all his friends together to take a picture of all of them.

Then, after he had taken the photo of all of them, one of the girls to get out her phone before walking away, and took a picture of the setup.

Next to where the tree where the camera was set up, was a temporary art shop, where about four artists work was displayed and they were trying to sell it. One of the artists came over to us and asked if she could borrow the camera, but said that she would replace is after and said that she would take a photo of her work;

When looking through the photos after, I also noticed that in one of the pictures, the young girl who took the photo, without knowing, got us in the back of the picture (yes we were all staring because we were intrigued as to whether they would actually take the picture, which they did, and we were also waiting for our food)

I also think that something happened to the film for some reason, so we lost (we think) 9 of the photos taken by the people, all of the film had been used (27 images) however we only got 18 images back when we developed the camera (the last 10 were taken by us just to use up the rest of the film) so I only have 8 pictures to show (which I am still very happy with, as I only expected about 3/4 images).

These were the 8 images we got, in the order they were taken: