by harrietread

Week 11

This week has been about thinking more closely about our photobooks. What I have been considering and planning has primarily been what kind of story I want to tell about cars through photography, and also how I will improve my technical and aesthetic practice when photographing cars.

So in my consult with Brian last week I was thinking about presenting my photobook like Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, in the sense that I wanted to go up to strangers with their cars and have a quick 2 min interview with them about why they like cars etc. What I want to get out of this approach is a humanising perspective of car culture.

In terms of my technical skills, this week I began doing some practice photography of cars. I practiced light painting, which i mainly done at night and involves having a really long shutter speed and then literally painting the car with light from a torch. My practice has proven effective so far. Now I need to practice composition and framing.

by harrietread

Week 10

This week, having finished our PB3 on Strangers and Stories, we are starting our next PB which is the photobook/compendium.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do initially. I was going to do cosplayers, but it quickly became apparent that it would be a bit complicated and I would rather keep it neat and accessible and simpler for this project. So I’m going to do car photography.

We had pitches and feedback on Tuesday. Considering I tend to get easily nervous, I felt good getting up and talking about what I wanted to do. I felt as though one of the tutors who gave feedback was more discouraging than encouraging, whether she meant it or not. The session definitely made me think about how I want to construct my idea.

Something that I can already see myself struggling with is the technical aspect. Taking photos of cars, especially as a speciality or for commercial purposes, is difficult to make look good. I’m going to do some research, practice and get some help from friends and my partner who have more experience in it.

by harrietread

Week 9

Having just finished our PB3 on Strangers and Stories, we will next week be starting on our final PB4, which is a photobook.

The only photobooks that I really know or have looked through include Underwater Dogs by Seth Casteel and this gorgeous book from the Australian Ballet.

I want to do something about people who love what they do. I’ve thought of a couple of things: illustrators, comic book artists, cosplayers. I really like the idea of doing cosplayers. It reminds me of the TED Talk by Adam Savage about the culture and community of cosplay, and it would be a great opportunity to get an insight into the process of creating an idea of a costume and becoming a character.

by harrietread

Week 8

This past week has involved finalising our photo essay projects for this assessment. I went into the Laundry Station this week for my photo essay, which is owned by the friend of my classmate Chynnae’s mum in Wyndham Vale.

What I wanted to convey in my photo essay was this notion that the laundry is a private space, but when we make it into a public space like a laundromat humans tend to find little bits of community and friendship even though they don’t go to the laundry to do so.

Technically, I chose to use a fixed 24mm lens for this shoot. The reason for this is that I wanted to expand the space that I was in and a wide angle lens tends to do this well. I wanted to create a sense of depth in the space. Additionally, I chose to use a fixed lens because I wanted to create an aesthetic consistency with my shots; I was aiming for a cinematic appearance to this photo essay. This created a difficulty for me in that I was more aware of how close I was to people, since I could not zoom in on figures. I noticed in editing that the edges were often more bowed out like a fisheye lens that I originally intended, but I find that aesthetically this creates a Wes Anderson-ish, quirky mood.

by harrietread

Week 7

Going to the NGV was an utter blast this week, really good to get out of the classroom!

Bill Henson’s almost Mapplethorpian aesthetic grabbed me immediately. The juxtapositions of youth, the natural world and classical art all melded together into this moody, harmonic image of the human condition for me. The dark, shadowy, cool toned aesthetic was so easy to absorb and ponder as well.

William Eggleston’s portraits felt so cinematic, like every image told its own story. I think that the first thing that really gripped me was the literal clarity of each image; the resolution, colour and technical brilliance of each picture made them look like they had been taken yesterday. Turns out the film that he used was a high quality cousin of Technicolour film used in cinema, which I believe is a contributing factor to the cinematic feeling of his series. I find that Eggleston’s method of composition and using high key or low key lighting also creates this feeling of a story being told. We get a sense of context, perspective, wondering where the characters have come from, where they are going and what they are thinking. I want to be able to apply this idea to my photo essay and create a sense of a story, simple or complex, being told.

by harrietread

Week 6

This week we have been looking more at photo essays and storytelling practices in photography. This is something that I have been looking forward to since to me, storytelling through visual imagery is incredibly significant through human history.

Something that I have taken away from Sebastio Salgado’s documentary, Salt of the Earth, was that there is some auteur theory that goes into how a photo essay is received. For instance, Salgado came from a background of commerce and economics. His photography explores, to an extent, the circle of life and the unity of the earth. He looks at how humans behave with eachother and with nature and our landscapes. He often uses a wide angle lenses to show a sense of depth within an image, and also the grand scale of the earth. Conversely, Vivian Maier was a nanny who looked at suburban and city life, at the individual characters within an urban space.

I will be sending my partner Chynnae hopefully to the office where my sister works as a social media marketing coordinator for a company that imports raw coffee beans. Part of her job is taste testing coffee beans in an intricate process called ‘cupping,’ and I hope that Chynnae finds the process visually interesting for her photo essay.

by harrietread

My Take: Wk 5 Uses of Photography

In this week’s tute we watched ‘Finding Vivian Maier,’ a documentary made by John Maloof, about a woman who practiced photography during her time working for forty years as a nanny. Something that I found both endearing and troubling about her character was how much she reminded me of people that I know in my daily life. Both her struggles with mental illness and her sense of self, however much she concealed it from people, are things that I recognise in myself and many of my friends and peers.

I find this significant because since so  many of these peers are highly creative and productive, I can recognise that creative people often tend to seek creative and productive activities to cope with or stay in touch with their mental health.

For our upcoming Project Brief, Strangers with Stories, I am a little nervous just because it is a daunting thing to have to go up to total strangers and ask them about their lives and interests.

by harrietread

My Take: Wk4 Uses of Photography

For this week’s Project Brief, we had to submit 5 original photos imitating a photographer of our choice. I chose dance photographer Lois Greenfield and submitted some photography of my friend Ciara, a classical and contemporary dancer. I focused primarily on lighting, since Greenfield’s photography of dancers and figures are lit with soft, bright high key lighting that illuminates the subject perfectly in motion. My friends and I used our old high school’s media and photography room, and it took us a lot of trial and error to actually set up the lights and softboxes until we had Ciara perfectly lit. I then used Adobe Lightroom to complete that perfect, weightless airbrushed aesthetic. I focused mainly on bringing up Highlights until the white background was completely smooth and seamless, and so the subject lit up smoothly and prominently.

by harrietread

My Take: Uses of Photography Wk 3

Tuesday’s class focused on photo editing, using Adobe Lightroom. I only started using it at the start of this year for editing a photoshoot for a dancer friend of mine, and I think I like it more than Photoshop.

Photoshop feels like it deals in absolutes, and it gets very technical and there are so many things you can do with it. Too many for me, since normally I just want to fix up the lighting.

Lightroom’s functions are really straightforward, and just playing around with it is enough for me to develop my skills. Failing that, YouTube and Google are full of tutorials that I can use. I’m appreciating in this studio that I am given a lot of time to practice my skills, rather than faffing around for 3 hours on some theory that leaves me braindead after 15 minutes.

by harrietread

My Take: Uses of Photography Wk 2

This week, I did my presentation on Robert Mapplethorpe, an iconic and influential photographer and artist who worked in the 70s-80s. He came from a conservative family, and moved to New York as a young man where he met the soon to be renowned artist and musician Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe inspires me as an artist and creative soul because he was someone who loved to and endeavoured to work endlessly, whether it was on a new art medium or a new idea in his photography. His work in the 80s focused mainly on the developing gay and lesbian movement in America, at a time when homophobia and stigmatism against AIDs was growing quickly too. Much of his photography at that time, such as the iconic Self Portrait with Whip, explored ideas around S&M, sexuality and homosexuality. He died of AIDs in 1989, but his desire to challenge audiences and push boundaries in art inspires me to give myself my own challenges, in my work, art and other aspects of my career.