This is my learning log for the OCA Ditigal Photographic Practice course

Wednesday 26 September 2012

Project–A sequence of actions–concluded

 

Exercise 2: My own workflow for an open ended assignment

I decided to make a few notes on my selection process for the “Shooting from the navel” project. I have started selecting images for the first selects folder. While I am doing this I am also forming in my mind what sort of images I want to show. These are some of the ideas I have had:

  • Fleeting moments captured but made permanent
  • First impression
  • Public selves
  • Look for narratives
  • How people respond (to finding they have been photographed) Add an explanation to the site offering to remove images if they are unhappy with being shown. Try to find out why? In the introduction, explain about spontaneity and that you are seeking a reaction, from the subjects if possible and from the viewer
  • When editing, look for something in an individual's expression or a certain juxtaposition in a group that makes the image interesting or provides narrative.
  • I think fifteen to twenty images for the first gallery will be enough.

An example of my editing technique is shown by the screen shots below as I select and crop various versions to put forward to my First Selects folder.

image

In this particular folder I selected two images and converted them to black and white tiffs using Silver FX Pro 2


image

I then made different crops of these two images to find different combinations of the various characters in the frames. From here I will make First Selects and subsequently my final selections. It is interesting to note that these particular images did not make it to the final selection. I also modified my cropping. As looked at the images I could see that there was a lot more to some of them than I first observed. This resulted in most of them being cropped minimally. The street is the context in which the figures are reacting and so deserves to be included. Those that have been cropped to portrait format however, have been cropped to isolate particular figures.

Final Selection:

I have uploaded my final selection to my web gallery. Click the image to view the gallery in a separate window. If you wish to comment, please return to this page and use the comment link below.

image

At this stage I have not made any effort to theme the images, I have made a selection based those that I find the most interesting and appealing.

Conclusion: This exercise has been the most challenging in this first part of the course, purely from the sheer number of images involved. This was good practice however as Assignment 1 has generated over 150 images which I shall now start to edit.