Overall, I am really pleased with how my zine turned out. Initially, I used these same images but in a different order to experiment with the layout and find which one I liked the best. Eventually, I liked this order and layout the best because the images flowed well to create a story. I chose to use 2 images together that linked to each other really well, or one image by itself which I think worked well.
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.
Photography captures a moment from time and fixes it in place. Photography did not just appear one day, it took years for photography to become a known art. It emerged experimentally through Camera Obscura. The earliest known written account of a camera obscura was provided by a Chinese philosopher called Mo-tzu (or Mozi) in 400BC. He noted that light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted image of the original object. Several other scientists experimented with light passing through a small hole, but it wasn’t until the 11th century that a viewing screen was used to see the inverted image. Alhazen (or Ibn al-Haytham) is said to have actually invented the camera obscura, as well as the pinhole camera which is based on the same idea. He carried out experiments with candles and described how the image is formed by rays of light travelling in straight lines.
What is Camera Obscura?
Camera Obscura is a natural and visual optical phenomenon, where the rays of light passing through a small hole into a dark space form an image where they strike a surface, resulting in an inverted and reversed projection of the view from outside.
People believe that photography was invented in 1839, but camera obscura was used before this time.
Photo example of Camera Obscura:
Nicephore Niepce & Heliography
What is Heliography?
Heliography is an early photographic process producing a photoengraving on a metal plate coated with certain chemicals to achieve the positive and negative tones. It was invented by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1822.
Nicéphore Niépce began experiments with the aim of achieving a photo-etched printmaking technique in 1811. By 1822, he had made the very first light-resistant heliographic copy of an engraving, made without a lens by placing the print in contact with the light-sensitive plate. In 1826, he increasingly used pewter plates because their reflective surface made the image more clearly visible. In 1827, he then produced the very first photograph.
Experimentation:
Niépce knew that the acid-resistant Bitumen of Judea used in etching hardened with exposure to light. In experiments he coated it on plates of glass, zinc, copper and silver-surfaced copper, pewter and limestone, and found the surface exposed to the most light resisted dissolution in oil of lavender and petroleum, so that the uncoated shadow areas might be traditionally treated through acid etching and aquatint to print black ink.
Photo example of Heliography:
Louis Daguerre & Daguerreotype
What is a Daguerreotype?
Daguerreotype is said to be the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography, created by the inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. The daguerreotype is accurate, detailed and sharp. It is very delicate because it has a mirror-like surface. Each Daguerreotype is a unique image on a silver coppered plate. This photographic process was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s.
Experimentation:
To make the image, the base is a sheet of silver-plated copper polished to a mirror finish. Then it was treated with fumes that made its surface light-sensitive, exposed it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary; which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting. The resulting image on it was made visible by fuming it with iodine vapours which formed a silver-iodine surface to the plate. The plate is then exposed to light transmitted through a lens, once exposed the plate was removed and exposed to vapours from heated mercury, only then would the image form. Then it’s sealed behind glass in a protective enclosure as the Daguerreotype is very fragile. The image will appear either positive or negative, depending on the angle at which it is viewed, how it is lit and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal.
Photo example:
Henry Fox Talbot & Calotype
Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre fixed shadows
William Henry Fox Talbot was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. Talbot was best known as the British inventor of photography and in 1834 he discovered how to make and fix images through the action of light and chemistry on paper.
What is a Calotype?
Calotype is a photographic process introduced in 1841 where negatives were made using paper coated with silver iodide. It produces a monochrome, blue coloured print on a range of supports, often used for art, and for reprography in the form of blueprints.
Photo example:
Robert Cornelius & self-portraiture
Robert Cornelius, an American photographer and pioneer in the history of photography, was said to be the first person to produce a self-portrait.
Around October 1839, Cornelius improvised a camera obscura and made his first daguerreotype, a self-portrait outside of his family store. The image required him to pose still for 10 to 15 minutes and has survived. Other early images of his family made by Cornelius have not been preserved. His self-portrait is generally accepted as the first known photographic portrait of a person taken in the United States.
Photo example:
Julia Margaret Cameron & Pictorialism
Julia Margaret Cameron is regarded as one of Britain’s foremost photographers and one of the leading portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorians and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature.
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in 1815 into a wealthy, highly cultured, and well-educated family. Cameron went to school mostly in France, and her education was well rounded, but not focused on fine art.
In 1841, one of Cameron’s most important friend sent her some “Talbotypes”, early examples of photographs by Henry Fox Talbot. This influenced Cameron into starting photography. Cameron was given her first sliding box camera as a Christmas present from her daughter, Julia, in 1863. Cameron quickly devoted herself to photography and within a month of receiving her first camera, she made the photograph that she called her ‘first success’. The photograph is a portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of a family staying in the Isle of Wight where Cameron lived.
From this, she quickly moved on to photographing family and friends for experimentation. Cameron worked quickly and diligently preparing photographs with new equipment. These early portraits reveal how she experimented with soft focus, dramatic lighting and close-up compositions, features that would become her signature style. Cameron embraced the ambiguity around her portraits and cultivated it intentionally, making her a forerunner to the Pictorialist photographers
Pictorialism:
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus, is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface.
Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visit
Henry Mullins was a highly successful photographer, and was by far the most prolific of the first generation of Jersey photographers in the mid-nineteenth century. He moved to Jersey in July 1848 and set up a studio known as the Royal Saloon, at 7 Royal Square.
Henry Mullins was by far the most prolific of the first generation of Jersey photographers in the mid-nineteenth century. He produced thousands of portraits of islanders between 1848 and 1873. While numerous photographic studios opened across the town of St Helier in the 1850s and 1860s Henry Mullins continued to be the photographer of choice for leading members of Jersey society and successful local and immigrant families.
Mullins started to create ‘Cartes de visite’ (visiting cards). They consist of a print stuck to a card mount of about 4 ⅛” x 2 ½” in size. Carte de Visites were traded among Victorians and were so small that they could fit in your pocket.
St Helier Harbour is the main harbour in Jersey Channel islands. It is on the south coast of the island, occupying most of the coast of the main town of St Helier. The harbour is used to dock Jersey boats, as well Jersey citizens travelling to and from the Island on the Condor Ferry. It is operated by Ports of Jersey, a company wholly owned by the Government of Jersey.
There are three marinas — the La Collette Yacht Basin, the Saint Helier Marina (built in 1980) and the Elizabeth Marina.
History:
Saint Helier Harbour is named after a 6th-century ascetic hermit from Belgium, Helier. The harbour was constructed in the early 19th century.
Dated pictures from the 19th century:
In 1814, the merchants constructed roads to connect the harbours to the town, which are now known as Commercial Buildings and Le Quai des Marchands. In 1832 construction was finished on the Esplanade and its sea wall. A rapid expansion in shipping led the States of Jersey in 1837 to order the construction of two new piers: the Victoria and Albert Piers.
What was the involvement of Jersey mariners in the Canadian cod-fisheries and the Transatlantic carrying trade?
It has been more than 400 years since the first Islanders crossed the Atlantic in search of grassland. They went to plunder the cod-rich seas of the American and Canadian coast.
By the beginning of the 16th-century Basque fishermen were travelling to the region to fish and, by 1580, around 10,000 European fishermen were making the transatlantic voyage to the area each year to fish for cod. Channel Island fishermen were among these and by the 1750s they had set up lucrative trade routes between Canada, Europe and America, establishing bases on the Gaspé Coast where they could salt and prepare the cod to sell. Which ports did Jersey ships sail to and trade with?
During the Roman period there was an established trade route between Alet (St Servan) and Hengistbury Head in Dorset. Guernsey was the favoured stop off point, because of the natural deep water harbour at St Peter Port, although these boats undoubtedly called in to Jersey as well.
What type of goods did Jersey merchants exchange for cod-fish?
Jersey cod-merchants exported cod-fish to British colonies in the West Indies and later Brazil too in exchange for plantation goods, such as sugar, molasses, rum, cotton, coffee and tobacco which it brought to markets in America, Europe and the UK (Inc. Jersey).
To what extent has the island of Jersey benefited from its constitutional relationship with Britain and the legacies of colonialism based on a slave plantation economy during the first Industrial Revolution (1760-1840)?
By the 1770s there may have been up to 70 Jersey ships and 2,000 Jerseymen engaged in the cod trade. By the 1840s it is estimated that the industry directly employed 4,000 people. Also, many others were engaged in manufacturing goods to be exported to the Canadian settlements.
However, Jersey was not without internal troubles notwithstanding increased prosperity. Both war and poor harvests led to increases in corn prices of such magnitudes that the poor were unable to feed themselves. Matters reached a head in 1769 when wealthy mill owners tried selling the little corn there was at very high prices to France, causing some local people to riot. The rioters went on to demand changes to the Island government which resulted in the Code of 1771, giving more power to the States Assembly.
1x fun fact of the maritime history-
Jersey has the third largest tidal movement in the world, with tides of over 40 feet (13 metres). The tide rises at a speed of 10 kph but on the south coast of the island, the sea rushes through the gullies at some points faster than a running horse.
For all of these spreadsheets, I wanted them to be in black and white to create an old, vintage affect. I started by creating different sized boxes using the rectangle tool, and placing the images I wanted to use. Then, once I had all the images I needed, I added another box to fill with text. I then finished with experimentation of the layout to see where I wanted everything to be.
I didn’t like this first one as I felt that all the photos were crowded on one side.
So, I moved the text to the middle, which I didn’t really like. I tried different options of where the text should be, so that there is a balance between the images and the text.
Final outcome:
I really like how this came out because I feel like the images and the text balance each other out, and the images draw your eye view towards the text.
Second spreadsheet:
Final outcome:
I think this was really successful as I added more text boxes to make the layout look organised and balanced with both the images and text.
Third spreadsheet:
Final outcome:
For this last spreadsheet, I decided to make it images only as I felt like this would look better overall as my previous spreadsheets include text, and I wanted to create something a little bit different.
To create this mood board, I took photos of students’ old photography work. I think they all work well together because the topic is St. Malo, therefore they all link to each other. Also, there is a lack of bright colours to focus on the meaning in the images rather than its appearance.
My plan and ideas for my own spreadsheet–
Title ideas:
The people of St. Malo
The Architecture of St. Malo
Behind St. Malo’s walls
Photos I will use:
I am making 3 spreadsheets, two with both images and text and one with just images. I will be using these images because they are all black and white, and they flow well together. I am making one spreadsheet focused on the people of St. Malo, and the other focused on the architecture.
