Over the course of 3 months I have learnt a variant of skills regarding editing and creating my final zine. Firstly, I became familiar with using InDesign and creating a narrative zine by editing and selecting relevant images that related to the Occupation Vs. Liberation title. The part I enjoyed the most about creating my zine was physically constructing it into a more visual narrative that was easily ledge able. The most enjoyable section which contributed to my zine was images from an assignment called ‘Home Sweet Home’, because it let me experiment with my personal ideas of occupation and liberation. It aided me in also exposing myself to different ways I could perceive a topic, abstract it and make it my own.

Throughout the People/Portraits section of this topic I learnt the importance of focus along with foreground and background. I learnt that in order to focus on a face you actually have to focus on something else in order for the depth to capture the details. An example of this in my work is when I was taking candid images for ‘Home Sweet Home’, I focused the camera on my grandpa’s hands instead of his face.

Another Technique I learnt was using flash in the studio on the infinity screen with coloured backdrops and historical objects as the centre focus. Using the technique of flash photography to create an even lighting set-up that responds to my shutter press. I also re purposed my knowledge of the colour wheel to benefit my colour schemes of my background. This benefited my work because it added a new spruce of colour to my work.

Next Steps

In continuing under the title of ‘Occupation Vs. Liberation’ I’m starting a new personal topic on how I interpret it. My new inspiration for this title is the liberation of my mind.

My next project will be covering the idea of finding my sense of purpose and belonging and physicalise what I see day to day. It is not a mental health awareness topic at all, that is not my aim. It’s visualizing how the un-explainable feelings can be explained through images and compositions. My intention is to not portray sadness or pain, i’m just wanting to liberate the stigma behind these feelings.

First Photo shoot

For my first photo shoot, I plan to take self-portraits and disfigure them by scratching my face out of them.

As my final layout of my zine, I have accomplished a ‘dos a dos’/accordion layout but displayed it on a different coloured spine. I wanted to do this because my overall idea was to create my own identity cards, like the ones given out during the occupation.I wanted to include my occupation related shoots and montages in the first section, then have images that relate to my life and my liberation. This personal section includes environmental shots of my family, alongside detail shots of my family. This overall I think was successful in the way it is laid out and how the content fits the title, however I was indecisive as to adding my photo montages due to the intensity of colours. However, this now in my opinion is very effective due to the pop of colour being needed to break up the rest of the content.

Zine 1

Zine 2

Zine Layout

For my Zine, I hope to achieve a ‘Dos a Dos’ layout with virtually 2 Zines attached to each other with a zig-zagged card. In one zine, i will have portraits and montages that oppose and in my second zine, I will have my archival and object shoots that relate to more of the occupation side of the project.

Unedited

Edits

Set-Up

For our studio objects photo shoot, we used continuous light on an infinity screen so that there was limited shadows and no distractions from the central object. For the birds eye view set up, we used flash head lights to give an even diffusion of light.

Final Edits

The cook maid and market scenes, popular in the seventeenth century evolved in the low countries from a genre practiced by Pieter Aertsen ( c.1533 – c.1573) and his colleague Joachim Beucklaear, which combined contemporary kitchen scenes with a new testament episode beyond. Bacon could have been inspired by the work he had seen on his visit he made to the low countries in 1613.

Religiously, this image would have suited the era in which it was painted. Symbolically, the idea that their is a house wife in the kitchen would have suited the traditional values that would have had to be upheld during this time. A woman would always be the one that sat at home and cooks for her family .

A tradition in my family is to regularly go out for family meals on a Sunday. Our lives are heavily family orientated with constant excuses for celebrations. This photo shoot was taken when I went to France and we went for our family meal with close family friends to a gourmet Chinese. I used standard flash to create a candid feel but to achieve the establishing shot, I got them all to stand in the order they wanted to.

In 1907, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, introduced the first viable method of color photography. Although color photographs had existed, the process was clumsy and complicated. The key ingredient, the Lumières discovered, was potato starch.

The process, called auto chrome, involved covering a glass plate with a thin wash of tiny potato starch grains dyed red, green, and blue, thus creating a filter. A thin layer of emulsion was added over that. When the plate was flipped and exposed to light, the resulting image could be developed into a transparency.

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One of the most delicate, in all aspects of the word, photographical techniques is the Autochrome. These early 20^th. Century colour photographs, invented by the Lumière brothers, (Auguste and Louis) show images with a ‘pointillistic’ effect. The Lumière’s contribution to colour photography is perhaps of more importance in comparison to their contribution in film history, since in the period (1895) they “invented” cinema, projected moving images where since long in existence!

Autochromes were not the first photographs in colour since the search for colour started at the dawn of photography and is seen in most early techniques true colouring by hand. E.g. Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Chrystoleums, etc. However, the autochrome was the first practical technique that produced colour without the artificial aid of an artist.