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Case Study:Mark Power-Shipping Forecast

April 19, 2019 Jade B Leave a comment

“The project was about those of us – and we are in our millions – who, through the Forecast, experience a reinforced sense of Britishness”.-Mark Power.

Mark Power is a British photographer, born in 1959. He is a member of Magnum Photos and Professor of Photography in The Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton. Power mainly uses a large format film camera, but has more recently explored into short film making. The Shipping Forecast is the project of his which is inspired by ‘The Shipping Forecast’, which is a BBC Radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of the British Isles. It is produced by the Met Office and broadcast by Radio 4 on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The forecasts sent over the Navtex system use a similar format and the same sea areas. and are fed back to the public four times a day. The waters around the British Isles are divided into 31 sea areas, also known as weather areas. In 2017, Radio 4 celebrated the Forecast’s 150^th anniversary, and there’s everything to suggest it’s more popular than ever. The best place to to listen to the shipping forecast is said to be in a cosy bed with the wind rattling the windows and the rain lashing down outside.Each image is captioned with the 0600hr forecast on the day they were taken. In Mark’s project it’s the people that are the main focus and how dependent they are on the shipping forecast.

Magnum- Mark Powers Article:

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/mark-power-the-shipping-forecast/

Analysis:

This is one of my favourite photos of Power’s project. It exhibits a ‘calm after the storm’ sort feel, as the sea appears to have hardly any waves and it a reasonable distance away from land. The battered buoy creates the idea that the sea has previously been viscous, this damage may have occurred over time or from just one strike of a wave, this emphasizes the powerful and unpredictable nature of the sea. He has used natural lighting, which appears to be overcast on that day. A black and white filter has been used, this suggests how the shipping forecast is so important even though it’s just audio and no images, it still creates a clear picture of the weather, without visuals or colour. The black and white may also have been used to create a less exposed picture as the sun can still be bright on overcast days. The cold tone creates an eerie mood, sort of like a ghost town, exhibiting the remains of what little is left. The messy looking vegetation could indicate high wind levels or it could be markings from the previous waves. There is a clear rule of thirds, with the the background (the sky), middle ground (the plants) and foreground (the sand). This is representative of the structured timing of the shipping Forecast schedule and how people plan their lives around these specific timings and although the weather is unpredictable, the one thing you can to rely on is that the programme will always be on at those times. The photo seems simplistic but the closer you look the more complex it is, for instance the three elements, water, earth and wind are all mixing together in harmony, all still in each others company.

Shipping Forecast:

A01 Develop ideas (research), A02 Explore and Experiment, A03 Record (photographs), A04 Personal Responses / Final Outcomes

Le Hocq:Experiment 1

March 11, 2019 Jade B 1 Comment

My Concept + Photo Shoot

I wanted to focus on Le Hocq beach as I lived nearby and I wanted to be able to take pictures throughout the day. I wanted to capture the journey in which the sun, clouds, water takes on a typical day in Winter. I was lucky to have enough that the weather was good and the sky was clear, but that did mean I had to ensure my pictures weren’t over exposed due the harshness of the sun, this was difficult. I started taking pictures at 1 pm and took pictures every hour until 7 pm. I held my camera for the post part but for several photos I put my camera on the wall. The picture below aren’t of every hour but are the best to represent the movement of the sun and change in brightness. I aimed to create a timeline for an afternoon at the beach, to show the true beauty of one of my favourite beaches in Jersey.

Analysis

Overall I found my first experiment to be reasonably successful. If I were to do it again I would have used a tripod and kept it in the same place for the duration of the shoot in order to have more emphasis on the change in just one particular part of the beach, but this is useful to know for my next photo shoot. I feel like my photos are pretty self explanatory, as they are just a timeline of Le Hocq beach, I used a medium to large lens for my photos as I wanted to focus in on specific parts of the beach but also capture the full atmosphere. I edited my photos in Photoshop by lowering the brightness, increasing contrast and lowering the exposure for the pictures I took earlier in the day. These pictures are personal to me as they are the view I having being seeing for the last 8 years, day in day out, so for me it’s nothing special in day light, but when the sun goes down it creates a different scene for me, something familiar yet exciting. I wanted to empathize how repetitive views don’t always have to be boring, the weather changes, the sun position changes, the sky is never the same, clouds are always moving, they change shape, the sun is always moving.

A01 Develop ideas (research)

Case Study:Dan Marker-Moore

February 27, 2019 Jade B Leave a comment

Brief Biography:

Dan is an American photographer and cinematographer. He specializes in landscapes, mainly cityscapes as he grew up in Chicago and then moved the New York. Before he’s a photographer, he’s a motion graphics and animation artist by profession. The photos of his I am going to be focusing on are time slice photographs. “A time slice is more than a photograph. A time slice takes a series of photographs and combines them into one single image. It takes slices of the same photograph offset in time from several seconds up to a few minutes.” Dan says he takes around 30,000 photos to complete his time slice work. He takes his photo’s over time in order to capture the environment at different times. DANORST_TimeSlice_London_BigBen_151214_3

Image result for dan marker moore

Analysis:

Image result for dan marker moore

This photo of Dan’s is of Los Angeles at night. The famous skyscrapers of American city life in which he grew up around are at the foreground of this photo and the bright lights reflecting off the water. The emphasis in contrast between the dark sky and the vibrant buildings exaggerate the idea that cities never sleep. It suggests that city people never get breaks, they are constantly moving, light are always on, cars beeping, people running to work, it’s constant pandemonium. There is a clear rule of thirds in this photo, in the middle is the city, the top is the sky and the bottom is the water. This mirrors the repetitiveness of city life and how its extremely structured, everyone gets up early goes to work then finishes work, commutes back home and then its repeated the next day .This symbolizes the difference between us and nature, we create the noise and pollution and the environment just has to deal with it. In comparison to the stillness of the sky and the water, even over time it remains the same, quiet and calm but the city is the opposite. It has a very cold tone, creating and eerie mood almost horror like, the water is so still and not much movement of clouds is occurring. He would have used a wide angle lens and put his camera on a tripod, which would have been kept in the exact same position in order to be able to create an accurate time slice of the city.

Why?

I chose Dan as my case study because I liked his idea of time being explored in just one place. Also I liked the modern feel to Dan’s work and how he focused on the light of the night, as I feel like day photography is more common than night photography. As it shows a journey without moving, emphasizing the fact that you don’t have to travel far to experience change. As well as I thought it suited Jersey because it is very small and you run out of place to go to, I wanted to capture the true beauty of Jersey, as I feel like our generation are very unappreciative of Jersey in winter. My aim is to capture an afternoon at the beach to go against the idea that most of my generation has that everywhere is same old, same old.

A01 Develop ideas (research)