We are going on a photography trip and during this trip we will be doing 2 photoshoots, one at the Old English and French Harbours and the other at Albert Pier. During these photoshoots, I am going to photograph the harbour to show how it has changed over time. I am also going to find some old images of the area and try to recreate them, showing the new surroundings.
For this photoshoot, we visited Jersey’s Maritime museum to learn about the history of Jersey’s Harbours, and capture it’s evolvement with our cameras. We also walked around 2 piers, Victoria pier and South pier. On Victoria Pier, we took some photos of the fresh fish from the ocean, and the fishermen at their job.
For these images, I colour coded and rated them out of 5 stars so I knew which ones were my favourite, the worst ones and the best ones to edit.
Before vs after: editingand experimenting
Photos I will use in my zine:
Evaluation:
Overall, I really like the photos I chose to edit because they are clear and show the reality of Jersey Harbours. Initially, in this photoshoot, I found that I wasn’t really interested in the harbour, but I loved visiting the maritime museum. I found that using photography to explore the harbour made the visit more exciting and engaging. I’m very happy with how the images came out, I focused on the colours of the images so I created negatives and positives using the intensity of the saturation.
The processes of making changes to images or text, deciding what will be removed and what will be kept in, in order to prepare it for being printed or shown.
a photo sequence means putting a bunch of pictures in the order the viewer will receive those images, it can be for a book, an exhibition walking tour, or just the reading order of a few photographs displayed on a wall, sequencing is ordering the visual flow, some will say storytelling.
Why?
I want to edit my images so I have both black and shite images and coloured images. This is so I can show the historic values of the St. Helier harbour and also the modern values.
I wanted to sequence my zine in a way that it would flow, almost like a time line.
Creating nostalgia for the viewer but also something or there time so they can relate too it, something they walk past everyday and take no notice of.
What Is The Difference Between Story And Narrative?
A story is a format, almost like a genre, whereas narratives are forever changing. For example if a big event happened and the police came to ask about it the event would be a story and the way that the witnesses’ describe it would be the narrative. You can tell narratives of the same story. It is very subjective and hybrid, with different people telling different narratives, or some people even having the exact same way of thinking.
Narrative can start to be constructed when two and two go together, your titles of your zine has to flow with the images within, which each have to flow with each other. For example you couldn’t have a zine that’s half birds and then half apples. The way that you select your images and how you sequence them within the zine will construct your narrative.
Your title plays a big part in identifying what you are trying to tell, it creates the story line, a base and format leaving the mind to link the connotations between your images and your text.
What Is A Zine?
The word ‘Zine’ is a slang word for magazine. Zines are short informal magazines, created to more entertain rather than educate. Magazines are paid productions of media, created by media conglomerates that create revenue by advertising and selling, whereas zines are more personal and hand made, they do not aim to create money so there are generally free and do not contain any adverts.
What Will Be My Story?
My zines story is going to be about the St. Helier harbour. I wanted to create something that shows the trade and exchange in Jersey, something that portrays how useful our waters and quays are.
Describe In Three Words
Jersey Trade & Communication
Describe In A sentence
An observation of the essentiality of Jerseys harbours and relationships.
Describe With A Paragraph
I want to tell a story about how important Jerseys trade and communications is. Jersey is a very small island, which means we are heavily dependant on other people. Although Jerseys harbours are seen as historic, just a maritime museum, I am going to portray how important they still are. We need trade to survive, without it we would collapse as a whole, that’s why keeping communications up is so important.
How Will I Create A Narrative And Tell My Story?
Anchorage with the title.
Use black and white images to portray history.
Use colourful images to create liveliness.
Use images with people in to observe communication.
Have images that flow, and all relate to trade and communicating.
Use images from different sections of the harbour to show trades impact.
Use images that portray wealth so I can show how trade has impacted our island.
Use an image of the trade being sold for goods (Quayside Café)
Use create fonts and words to tell a unique story.
Maybe include some images from the photographic archive to show the history of trade.
Use some image captions to add a signified meaning.
Maybe add a short introduction to let people know what I want them to interpret.
The channel islands were separated from mainland Europe, due to rising sea levels in the Neolithic period. After maritime activity began, they desperately needed start trading so over time they became more advanced, built up skills, started earning money and investing capital in maritime businesses.
Roman hoards had later been discovered, however people were unsure of the reason for being on Jersey. Evidence of Roman settlements on the Island show intricate trading networks.
1950 in Canada, After Charles Robins arrival permanent fishing stations were established, having had a com-mission he was given the privilege of trading cod/ other types fish.
What was the involvement of Jersey mariners in the Canadian cod-fisheries and the Transatlantic carrying trade?
Between the 15th to the 18th century, technical and navigation improvements were made enabling ships to have the ability to sail out of sight from land for days. This meant that trade could increase across the channel, and so became involved in the Canadian cod-fisheries. Cod Merchants from Britain were beginning to set up fisheries on the Gaspe coast. The islands were given concessions which were then traded, including dried cod from Newfoundland and Gaspe coast, cloth, wine, wool, leather and household goods.
Jersey’s maritime history of trade and cod triangle links with South America, Newfoundland and Gaspe. Trading mahogany and cod reveal toe between Jersey and the transatlantic slave trade.
Which ports did Jersey ships sail to and trade with?& What type of goods did Jersey merchants exchange for cod-fish?
Jersey cod merchants traded cod across the channel, where the islands were given concessions.
Jersey Merchants were heavily involved in the Atlantic trade, otherwise known as the ‘merchant triangle.’ They traded with concessions such as agricultural or manufactured goods/ products, in which were exchanged in the British Empire, as well as other European colonies in the Caribbean, South America and the Mediterranean.
In the 18th century Charles Robins was one of Jersey’s premier cod-merchants, who later formed markets in Canada, producing two types of cod suitable for where they were later exported too.
Salted cod otherwise known as ‘green’ cod was more ideal for selling on the markets in the Caribbean or North East Brazil as this was fresher which was a shorter run in the triangular Atlantic trade. This type was now called ‘West India Fish,’ which was sold to planters to then feed to its enslaved populations in hope to increase the productivity in the plantations, as it was protein rich. In exchange, Robin would load his ship with plantation produce such as sugar, rum, molasses, cotton, coffee and tobacco before sailing across on the third leg of the Atlantic triangular trade route to the Mediterranean, England and Jersey.
Dry-cured cod, also known as ‘yellow’ was marketed as a premier product and sold to markets in Europe, such as Portugal, Spain and Italy, with their large Roman Catholic populations, fish was in great demand. From ports in Lisbon, Cadiz and Naples merchants traded cod-fish for other products such as salt (used in the curing process), wine, spirits, fruits and spices which they brought back to Jersey and British ports before returning to Canada.
St Helier Harbour is the main Harbour in Jersey. This harbour is used to dock Jersey citizens boats, as well as how Jersey citizens travel to and from the Island on the Condon Ferry. There are 3 marinas in St Helier Harbour, which are used for private yachts on pontoons and drying harbours for commercial shipping, with facilities including a dock for lift-on/lift-off cargo ships, roll-on/roll-off ferry berths and a tanker berth. This harbour is operated by Ports of Jersey, the operative government company.
A Berth- A designated area where a vessel may be moored, typically for unloading and loading, assigned by an authority – in this example, Ports of Jersey.
The harbour gains its name from the 6th-century ascetic hermit from Belgium, Helier (Helierius).
I took these photos a week after I took the first ones, on the 18th of September. This time the sea was a lower tide, As well as being more sunny. We went around the maritime museum for the first 1-2 hours of our trip. Then after lunch we went around the harbour, but to different areas of the piers around. I focused more on portrait photography this time since I already have many photos of the piers, as photos with people normally tell more of a story.
here are some local fishermen who I asked for some photos. I would like to of positioned my camera more to the right so the man on the left wont be cut off by the pole. However I do think the composition is nice as there is not much negative space (as most areas have a face in), and the pole can be a leading line towards the right person. The right person also has a lot of character in his face so it helps add more story to the photo. To edit I added a black and white filter, and changed the contrast slightly. I also cropped it a little bit.
I like this photo because the bad boys paddle contrasts the subject on the left who seems a bit nervous.
This photo was taken inside a shell fish area, It was very dark and had containers with different shell fish in each.
Here is a montage of 3 images (plus 1 large image), each of buildings around the harbour. I chose these photos to be next to each other since each building is very large, showing the scale of the harbour in jersey. For editing I bumped up the saturation and contrast slightly, while adjusting the blacks and whites to make each image a similar style.
here are some photos from the maritime museum. Unfortunately a lot of my photos came out full of noise because I needed to increase the ISO to above 2000 since it was very dark.
Here is some photos of a worker changing the chains along the sea floor. I edited it so the neon green safety jacket would be the only object with saturation. This method of selective saturation can reduce the busyness of an image and allow the subject to be more obvious.
I tried again but with this dock workers shoes and it looks a bit naff. I will increase the workers exposure so he doesn’t blend into the background more, I will also try cropping the image to reduce background noise and to make the subject larger.
This looks a bit better in my opinion but still not the best.
Here is are 4 images that I edited with these settings:
These are all quite similar images In my opinion. They all don’t has an obvious main subject, meaning the eyes don’t have an obvious place to rest, making it more chaotic. They are also different in some ways as well, the first image and second image have a foreground and background where as the third and forth image is mostly all background.
Here is a one off image I took through a little gap in curb. It has good composition and reminds me of picture cards that you get while on holiday.
Our school did a trip around the St Helier harbours. A tour guide that explained some of the things I talked about in previous blog posts in more detail, which I added later on to those blog posts. My goal for this photoshoot was to capture the present harbours and compare them to what the harbours use to look like. We got handed photos on our tour at certain locations, showing how the area use to look like which was very interesting. I also learned about this photographer from France who takes photos of boat textures, which looks like abstract art on a canvas.
Here is some edited photos from my photoshoot:
For the first image I increased the saturation and contrast slightly, and aligned the subject to the middle. For the second Image I cropped towards his face more since it looks very sailor like, as well as creating a B&W image that I like.
For this photo I noticed that the background noise distracts from the subjects, so to combat this I used a radial filter around the subjects on Lightroom, then decreased the sharpening around the filter, as well as decreasing the exposure.
Here I just increased the saturation and changed some of the highlight settings, I cropped it so the boat is on the rule of thirds, so the eyes naturally go towards the people in the boat.
The left is my photo, and the right is a comparison from the mid 20th century, after the pier was built. As you can see nothing much has changed. One thing I did notice was how there are just less people around, this may be because we where doing shots while people where at work, however this contrast of people to no people does make our current time seem less exciting.
Above is a some more abstract photos towards the end of the pier.
Above I took a photo of the steam clock around new north quarry. I took 8 photos each at different angles giving this topology.
These photos are some inspiration for photos to take when we go on our trip to St Helier Harbour. I would like to incorporate a lot of industrial components into this first photoshoot, and take more photos of historical elements in my next photoshoot.
The Three Main Harbours of Jersey:
–La Collette Yacht Basin.
–Saint Helier Marina.
–Elizabeth Marina.
Harbour History.
In the 19th Century the Old Harbour was constructed. The Chamber of Commerce urged the States Assembly to build a new harbour, but they refused, so the Chamber took it into their own hands and paid to upgrade the harbour in 1790. To shelter the jetty and harbour a new breakwater was constructed and in 1814 the merchants constructed the roads now known as Commercial Buildings and Le Quai des Marchand’s. They did this to connect the harbours to the town and in 1832 construction was finished on the Esplanade and its sea wall. In 1837, a rapid expansion in shipping led the States of Jersey to order the construction of two new piers.
Edited Photos.
Edits.
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
Whilst visiting Elizabeth Marina, La Collette Yacht Basin and Saint Helier Marina I attempted to get many pictures from different angles in order to replicate images when editing. I decided to go on a bright sunny day in order to capture the blue sky and shimmering water.
I decided to select these 4 images and convert them to both edited to be bright and colourful and also in black and white. I have also displayed a side by side comparison of both to decide which edit is more effective per image.
Edits and Experimentation.
Digital camera style editing inspiration.
For these images, I focused on editing these photos to look like they are taken in different eras such as the 40s- the 80s with a variety of cameras. Some have an older look by being more low quality and discoloured, some have a brown tint to them to look older and some have a more greenish tint to them to create a 90s style vibe to them. I particularly enjoyed editing these photos to give a 90s/ digital camera style as I am new to interpreting an older picture using Adobe Lightroom however I enjoyed experimenting with different filters etc.
My attempt.
Here is an example of the camera settings I used to create a digital camera interpretation.
Comparisons:
St Helier Harbour at night Jersey Victorian period.
My Edited Image.
This image I have attempted to replicate an old photograph of St Helier Harbour. I chose a photo which is similar which includes a combination of boats and buildings. However, I struggled to give my image a low quality, old feel to it. Although the brownish tint is similar I could not make the objects as defined and low quality than I would’ve liked.
Google Image.
My Image.
I particularly like this comparison as I tried to add a very very small blueish tint to this black and white photograph to make it slightly different than plain black and white.
At first glance, I was disappointed at a mark on my lens creating a few black dots on my photograph, but after editing my image I feel it adds an older, authentic and low quality feel to my photograph and has make it look more effective.
My Image.
Google Image.
For this image, I decided to recreate an up-to-date image from the present time. This photo was the easiest to edit and interpret as I only increased the vibrance and made the image sharper as the photo is used for promoting Jersey so the colours are sharper and brighter.
Overall, this first photoshoot was successful to photograph and edit photos. Although for my 2nd photoshoot of St Helier Harbours, I hope to incorporate more photos capturing beaches, people and the production of seafood.
For this second photoshoot, I explored both the museum and around the industrial sector which was largely different to the old pier. I took 700+ images this time as I found it more interesting.
I split these into 3 sections: People, industrial and the museum.
In the museum I learned about many of the myths and urban legends such as:
Lé Tchian du Bouôlay. This is a man wolf which resembles a massive black dog with large eyes. He was known to follow pedestrians before a storm and so acted a warning to fishermen.
Contact Sheet and Selection
Edits
1
2
Combining all of my images in total, I decided that these were my best:
