Wednesday 13th January 2016

Today we started off by doing a mind map on the board to show what we had done this week to put into our blogs, we then continued to do our blogs for the rest of the day. We then had to partner up with someone we don't usually speak to on the course and look at each others blogs from this term.

Tuesday 12th January 2016

Today we looked at Photoshop, in which we talked about layer masking and airbrushing, this process was done by taking a portrait photo we had taken and creating 2 layers, one sharp and one soft, we created the sharp layer by increasing the clarity and the soft layer by decreasing the clarity. We then had to rasterise the sharp layer, then layer mask and paint brush where we wanted to make the models features softer. Here is the original image that Bridey took of Jordan which I used and the edited version of the image, as you can see the features on his face that you would want to be softer have been made softer and features on his face you would want to be bolder and stand out better have been made sharper. In this session we also looked at fashion photographers such as David la chapel, Nick Knight, Rich Lewis, Dave Hill and many others.

 

In the afternoon we had a session on the law and ethics of photography, this included looking at an article on a photographer that had taken a photo for photojournalism, and had photo shopped it and the company thought it was wrong for them to do that. We were asked our opinions on what we thought and were told to write a 250 word assignment on our opinions on two quotes from the article. Once we had completed that we were allowed to go out and take photo's. Me, Amy and Jordan went to Beaumont park to take some pictures.

 

Today we looked at an article from the New York Times about a photography competition showing how 20% of the participants were disqualified in the final part of this competition due to over processing their pictures. We read and analysed several people’s opinions from the article, including the jury chairwoman who is an assistant manager and director at The New York Times. The majority of this article is biased as the opinions are all from the competition officials. Although Lars Boering, the managing director of World Press Photo, was more on the fence than any of the competition officials. 

He found solutions on how to tackle any problems with the rules of the competition and stated that “When they have questions during the period they submit the work, a team is able to answer these questions” this shows that the photographers that were disqualified knew that over processing their image wasn't actually allowed, especially in photojournalism, because nothing should be cut, cropped out, or hidden as it could completely change the meaning behind the image. 

There was only one actual partaking photographer interviewed for this article and he was anonymous, showing that either he must've not been allowed to show his identity or he was too scared of the officials on their high horses as they seem to have a lot of power. He stated that it doesn’t matter what the photographers remove because they all work in a different ways. “As photojournalists or documentarians we aim to highlight life and tell stories, but we are all to do it in our own way.” is the exact quote. However I’m not entirely sure I would agree with him on this account as he is talking about photojournalism, an image that is used to tell a story, an honest story in which nothing should be hidden as people should know the truth because honesty is said to be the best policy.

In my opinion, the photographer does have a point - photography is an art form that we all form differently, so there shouldn’t be any disqualification based on art, however, there is a line to where you should stop editing out things, as sometimes it is best to leave things in so it lets people see the whole image and he meaning behind it. For example take the famous picture of the Vietnamese girl running down a street screaming because she was affected quite seriously by a napalm bomb. The original picture was actually cropped as it showed an american soldier walking besides her on the road just rolling a cigarette and not caring about her or the other children, and this told a completely different story. Overall I am in between opinions on this subject because both opinions are very valid. 

Monday 11th January 2016

Today we had a contextual lesson on social documentary, in which we looked at photographers who documented the difference between classes in their own unique way. We then had to go out into Plymouth and take our own images of 'street photography' here are a few of the edited images I took. When we came back from our shoot, we had to pick and edit our favourite image and compare them to a documentary photographer.

Wednesday 6th January 2016

Today we did a food tasting session, in which we tried different foods from different cultures. I didn't try many foods but the ones I did try were really nice. There were mixtures of sweet and savoury foods like shortbread, oreo bake, naan bread, stuffed vine leaf and many other things. There were two tables filled with so many different foods, which was my heaven, to be honest. We didn't really do much else except update blogs and edit photo's etc..

Tuesday 5th January 2016 

Today we watched a documentary by Martin Parr called "think of England" which was about interviewing people on what it takes to be British. I found this documentary interesting as it showed the younger generation and the older generation and what they thought on not only being British but it also showed how different the two generations live. After we watched this documentary I decided to look into his photography work, which I quite liked. I found a body of work he did called "bored couples" which was basically photos of couples out and about looking bored. Here is one of the images that I liked and found that was quite similar to one of the images I took whilst we were out on a shoot.

Martin Parr - Bored Couples



My Image
 

Shoot plan

.Go around town and take photo's of things that capture my attention
.To go into places like the market, cafe's etc..to take photo's of people in their day to day life.

 

~After shoot~

I ended up taking some cool photo's in the market and funnily enough at KFC, I got some nice shots of Jordan which I really like. The images don't really show "what it is to be British" However I still liked them and think they look very street photography.

 

During the afternoon session we looked at statistics on things that we found interesting. I decided to look at the statistics on religion. I found the religious aspect quite interesting. This could link into my photography shoot/project because I think I'd like to do something based around culture/religion because it can be so fascinating to know about other religions/cultures as they're probably so different to mine.

The others

This project is all about how we see other people. We have to show diversity in the 21st century in our photography by recording our experiences, documenting our findings, explore the impact of words, actions and behaviours on 'others' By the term 'the others' I mean, different cultures, gender, sexuality, religion etc...We are to pick one or several of these and put our ideas into our work. When we first got told about this project I was excited because I enjoy the thought of seeing other peoples views on things like this and I think it's a good idea to put points across however I feel this task may be quite a tough one because, 1, we have such a limited amount of time and 2, it's quite hard to find lots of different cultures in a place like Plymouth. However, I kind of have an idea for this project, I am not certain on it yet but I feel as if it would be quite a cool concept. My idea is to get a few different models and have them wear different headdresses that different cultures wear, but focus on their eyes in the images. So it would be a portrait shoot, preferably in a studio but if not then somewhere else. This shoot would be similar to the work of Steve McCurry, who does portraits of different cultured people. Much like these two photo's he took. As you can see, in his images he really focuses on the eyes, as soon as you look at the photo you are drawn to their eyes, which is what I like about the photo's.