For this project, I went on a journey with my mum to the St Saviours abandoned hospital to show the state that it is was in. As I turned up to it, it was shocking to see it all boarded up and see warning posts all over the walls. I took photos of people on the way there.
Even though some of the photos I took were good, they just weren’t what I was looking for and didn’t really link in with the theme I was doing.
I first placed out my images to see if my ideas I had out on paper would work. some of them, I realised wouldn’t, and others I ended up having better ideas once I played around with placing them. In the end I ended up using foam board to create different levels and I used black paper to create the look of old film slides. laying out the placement of photos and grouping them together really helped see what was effective and what wasn’t. I had so many more better ideas once I had the prints in front of me and was able to use my images more effectively.
Below are my mounted and displayed final pieces for the theme “Journey’s and Pathway’s”. I am very happy with how these displays turned out and I was able to capture exactly what I wanted to present.
Below is what my photos would look like displayed in a gallery –
Overall I am very happy with how the displays turned out because they look very effective and well made.
“Ryan Mulford (b. 1987) is an American artist.
His career began as a designer, creating award winning work for leading advertising agencies and global brands. In 2010 he transitioned to contemporary art.
As an artist, Mulford has developed his own distinct style—appropriating imagery and redefining the context. He has pioneered an innovative creative process that seamlessly blends vintage materials, modern technology, and traditional mediums.
Mulford lives and works in Northern California.”
https://www.ryanmulford.com/about-ryan-mulford
For this project, I will be using photos from my beach photo shoot and my bus stop photo shoot. I will be using the style of the shapes of the beach photo on top of the bus stop photo. I will mix my style with Mulford’s style.
I really like how this image turned out. I think the blue and colour of the sea and the brownish colour of the bus stop image work well really together. I also really like the contrast between the two images.
I am really happy with this photo. I think the black and white really compliments to the diamond shapes of the sea.
I am really happy with the outcome of this photo. I really like the simpleness of the four lines, I think it gives the photo a very clean and aesthetic feel to it. I also again like the contrast between the colour of the sea and the black white background photo.
Editing of the images was primarily done in Light room. Since the images were shot in raw, light room allows for a lot of control over the images in the shoot.
Above I have attached the setting used in light room to retouch this image. I decided to Marginally lower the exposure on the image to better capture some of the details on the brighter parts of the photo. The contrast and highlights were also brought up in order to help show detail without introducing grain through the use of sharpening. The shadows were also brought up as I had felt as though I had lost some of the detail in the dark portions of the photo. Whites were then also brought up in order to further increase contrast. I used lens correction in order to preserve the shape of the camera. I also decided to remove chromatic aberration in order to preserve the color palette of the image.
Technical: I will try to stick to an ISO of 100 in order to minimize grain and so I will vary the shutter speed in order to achieve the desired exposure, thus I will use a tripod for any images with a shutter speed slower than 1/50. I will use an F stop between 5.0 and 5.6. I will try to keep the lens length around 50 mm to get a noticeable depth of field. The photos will all be primarily taken using natural lighting however some unnatural lighting elements may be included in the photography.
Where: I will photograph various locations with elements fitting my studied photographers. This will include a construction site and a waste management center.
What: I will be photographing various physical boundaries as well as boundaries put in place by the law (such as signs prohibiting various behaviors).
When: I will be conducting this photo-shoot around 4pm in order to avoid hash lighting. I will also take these photos with a grey sky in order to keep my options for color correction open, i also believe this will closer resemble the works of Paul Graham.
For my final displays I decided to do a lot of overlaying of images. My first composition on the left is 3 A3 printed images stuck straight onto white card in a diagonal line, the top and bottom images also have smaller A5 images which where first stuck onto foam board then placed on top. I did this because firstly, to the eye it all fits together so having them apart would make the images lose their meanings, and secondly it continues my idea of the life cycle : natural material decomposes into soils then new things are planted until they die and decompose into the soil. My second composition is all of my off-cuts rearranged into an order that still makes sense. Although all of the images are mixed up, the idea of time being the killer is still present.
“Rocio Montoya (Madrid, 1983) is a photographer, graphic / web designer and editor based in Madrid, Spain. Her specialty is the experimental photography, land on which has moved from its creative inception. Also passionate for the editorial design, in 2010 she founded DOZE Magazine, which has co-directed and designed until its closure in June 2014.
Her interest is particularly focused on the portrait, approached through different plastic techniques and always with photography as the essential basis of each final artwork . Throughout her career as an artist she make a personal exploration of behaviors and emotional states of the human being, transforming reality by manipulating the image to convey their perception of the environment through aesthetic experiences.
She immersed herself in the field of visual arts by curiosity to express her concerns and the need to seek beauty as a means of escape and personal enjoyment. Her admiration for painting and surrealism is evident in addressing their creations, which you can see a clear trend to recreate atmospheres and distant situations to pure documentary reality, characterized by a delicate, haunting and poetic graphic style.
The human body in synergy with nature, the female figure and the loss of identity are the conceptual basis of her work.
One of her most recent interests is illustration, a field in which she began to submerge more conscientiously in 2018. With techniques such as watercolor, graphite and gouache Rocio has tackles new creations with a powerful chromatic charge and with women again as protagonists.
In addition to her personal work, Rocio Montoya has done numerous fashion editorials and has worked as a newspaper photojournalist.”
https://rociomontoya.com/bio/
For my response, I will be printing out the photos and sticking photos of plants and vines onto the photo of the models. I will be linking it to the journey of life, the flowers and vines coming out of the models represents life itself.
Overall, I am really happy with how these photos came out. I think they capture Montoya’s style very well. I think if I had done them on the computer they would’ve looked a bit better, but I still like how they look on paper.
For my second response to Luke Fowler, I decided to take pictures in Mojacar during the day as well as the night. When two images are exposed in one frame, the viewer is able to see the relationship between the juxtaposed photographs.
I captured images during the day under natural light and used flash photography for some of the night time shots when there wasn’t enough light source to capture the image. When returning to the same location during the night, I had to make sure that I was in the same postition to get the exact composition as the day time image.
On Photoshop I included a black frame that surrounds the pair of images to replicate Luke Fowler’s two-frame films. I edited the images on VSCO to create a film effect to replicate his photography style.
Overall, I think the side by side comparison of the two images in day and night was successful because you get to see the same location under different lighting. The black frame helps to link the two images together while the comparative images using different levels of lighting creates contrast to emphasise the juxtaposition.
In order to improve upon my technique, I would change the order of my photoshoot and capture the nocturnal images first of all. A number of my night time images weren’t clear due to inadequate lighting, blurring and the limited range of the flash. After capturing clear images at night it would be much easier to replicate the same composition during the daytime. Additionally I would ensure that I had a tripod available to maintain camera stability and reduce movement that made some of my photos blurry.
For my last photo shoot, in response to The New Topographic, I captured images of the mountainous landscape in Mojacar. However, in many images you can see how vehicles have destroyed the surface vegetation creating dry, compacted patches of dirt. Although the mountains and shrubs create a beautiful landscape, they have been partly destroyed by human actions. The destruction of the natural landscape links to The New Topographic because nature has been steadily degraded by mankind.
Like all the previous photoshoots in response to The New Topographic, the images have been edited on VSCO with filter and grain.
