I thought it would be worth sharing the key words I used in Korsakow to build the database to better illustrate how I worked with the software. To explain it simply, Korsakow is a piece of database software, where media is loaded into it, and links are created in the form of shared defining key words for a file. The key words, in tandem with a custom interface design, generate links to the different media in a dynamic and more random way than conventional gallery software. Here are the ones I used.

I split them up into two categories being the logical progression of space that will be linked together (from one spot, to the spots next to it and so on), and the abstract characteristics of each image that are shared by multiple images. I tried to keep keywords short and simple just to save in typing time and space. I went through the images and noted the most pertinent details that were shared by several images and I would use those to link them.

I decided to keep logical links for two reasons. One is that, when the abstract links fail to maintain a recurring chain of links, the logical ones will keep the program running. Two is that is offers the user the option of progressing through the images logically if they prefer, over the sometimes seemingly random nature of the photograph characteristics.

The tedious part is typing in key words manually for each image. I also found upon completing this that the keyword Arch was for too abundant (as arches are a big feature of this style of architecture) and so I removed that as a key word after the fact.

• What is the idea?
  • A meditative photo essay studying the visual significance of the Former Magistrates Court, now known as Building 20. Meanwhile, audio pieces will accompany the images to illustrate the timeliness – or rather, timelessness – and historical significance of the building by invoking sounds of last century and the modern city.
  • Interactive elements will allow a user to navigate through the series of images & audio and view them at their own pace.
• What will it look like?
  • Images will be tightly composed and considered to display the most pertinent features of the building’s exterior and interior.
  • Photography will use a mixture of wide and tight shots, to focus in on architectural details.
  • Emphasis will be put onto processing the images to bring out particular colours and shapeliness of the design, final images will not be so much realistic as embellished to better appreciate the visual presence of the heritage structure.
  • Audio will be minimal, and will aim to primarily create a mood for each image or section of images. For example, aural details such as horses and carriages, and trams will help place the image in time, or perhaps throughout it’s time, by mixing sounds both old and new.
  • Contextual information for each image may be included as a part of the image’s description, or perhaps as a part of each images aesthetic. This textual information would be minimal however as to not draw too much attention away from the visual aspect of the final piece.
• How will this style be achieved?
  • The equipment being used is simple and nimble: Canon 60D with an 18-55mm & 50mm prime lens. The zoom lens provides wides, while the prime offers excellent frames for detail. A H2n zoom recorder will be used to record available sounds and foley, which will complement public domain and archival recordings in the audio pieces.
  • Software will include Adobe Lightroom for image processing, and Adobe Audition for audio editing and mixing.
  • While sound will be restrained in it’s execution, images will be processed to bring out the colours, textures, and shapeliness of the building’s architecture.
• What platform will it be hosted?
  • Currently I am considering drawing on a quirky use of YouTube’s annotation system wherein each image can be rendered with the audio as a video, and sections of interest in each image can be highlighted as hyperlinks. By uploading images as these videos a private network of videos can be created so that users can navigate all of the videos like a virtual space.
  • YouTube makes for a lightweight and widely appropriated platform too that can be embedded and shared very easily and hence is very well future proofed as a perk. Embed settings can remove the title and playhead to make for a cleaner experience also.
  • This approach can however be clumsy in it’s execution, so other gallery/audio websites are being considered such as a blog that allows for full screen images and autoplay sound such as the more graphical blogging platform tumblr.

As I’ve been given the responsibility of uploading most of everyones’ work and the panoramas to the platform of choice, I thought it seemed relevant to note why we picked it, and what features it offers. As I’ve mentioned before YouVisit offers native VR support for VR tech such as the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard which I think is really neat and should make our project pop. It has a very simple graphical interface (although it does sometimes lack intuition, as we had to email their support team regarding file sizes, ratios etc.) and for the mot part it works well.

It took some fiddling with the panoramas though, to get them to work properly. First I tried stretched the image to fit into the ratio specified by YouVisit for panoramas (6000×3000) which didn’t work, then I tried cropped them to fit, which obviously didn’t work since then the panoramas were not complete, finally I realised that since YouVisit automatically stretches the images into a photosphere (something they also did not specify), the image must be kept at it’s normal height and simply scaled down to fit into the 6000×3000 canvas in photoshop. This means that in YouVisit the panoramas are essentially letter boxed, but for the most part this isn’t too detrimental to the experience, and if you zoom into the image, it can almost entirely hide the black borders.

I feel like this was a good choice as this platform is well suited to modern technology, specifically VR technology, and it’s a clean enough interface that it can be well presented to an audience, something terribly lacking in other virtual tour platforms. I am also compressing all of the images so I don’t have to wait another 8 hours to upload all of the stills material to their website which can, at times, be a bit weird with uploading and processing images. I ma yet to notice any degradation in quality of the images because of this.

So this may be a little off topic on my particular project, but I went with George Downing to photograph Building 16 for the Virtual Tour. The idea is that by photographing the building using sets of panoramas we can utilise the platform we decided to use (YouVisit) and it’s native integration with Virtual Reality technology, and more specifically, Google Cardboard. Hopefully it will make the tour of the buildings more interesting than simply a linear click through of flat images.

I’ve never done panoramas before so it was a fun challenge, especially considering the highly varied lighting in parts of the building. For example windows are incredibly bright in a photograph of an otherwise well exposed room. We decided that since the windows aren’t really of interest, we could have them as overexposed and white.

I hadn’t spent much time in Building 16 apart from then though, so it was interesting to see the starkly different architecture that looked like something out a time machine gone horribly wrong. Overall it wasn’t particularly difficult, but really only took a bit of time for each panorama as we had to ensure we had full 360 degree coverage from each spot. Unfortunately we couldn’t get to the Level 1 Lecture Hall due to lectures being held in there every hour, and we had to wait for the main Auditorium on Level 5 to be clear of high school kids before we could fully photograph it.

The images came out really well though, and the 5D worked a treat, especially it being a full frame which made the wide angle a lot more pleasing than what I am used to with my cropped frame 60D. The real hard part is uploading the photographs as we shot in both RAW and a high quality JPEG, so that’s going to take about 8 hours to complete.

As my piece is increasingly a minimal one the title needs to help contribute to the overall mood and meaning. I’ve spent some time considering a title, but haven’t tried too had to create one before I feel comfortable with one. I’ve come to think about perhaps White Gold due to the abundance of yellows and golds in and on the building. As I toyed around with the photographs I also ended up altering the white balance in otherwise white walled rooms to give them a shiny, light gold finish. I don’t feel this best encompasses my intentions of memory and time though.

What I’ve come up with now is to reference what Paul Gough came and talked to use about, and include the word ‘Cenotaph’ in the title, to illustrate the building as not simply an old structure, but as architecture and building materials that were used decades ago, as a building of history, of time, and of anachronisms. I thought maybe so far Golden Cenotaph or Time Indeterminate.

I decided immediately that Adobe Lightroom would achieve the aesthetic I want from the images, and considering I have about 200 photographs to sort through, it makes for an incredibly fluid workflow. In the past with my photography or architecture I’ve developed a soft spot for playing around with the Luminance and Sharpening settings. In tandem, they can create some strange effects. My go-to preset for these is to push the sharpening to a medium-high amount, and change the Radius setting to 3 – the maximum – which forces dots and tiny lines in the image to create tiny fragments if you look very closely. It also helps assimilate some of the noise intrinsically present in the images.

Now adding Luminance to this sharpened image almost complete hides the noise, softens flat surfaces, and softens the sharpening effects just enough to make them less jagged. This final product is something that resembles an impressionist style painting as the image now almsot looks as if it is made up of many tiny strokes of colour and shapes. Overall the image becomes sharper and cleaner.

For lighting I try to push highlights and shadows as far as I can before they clip. I don’t worry too much about small areas of clipping, provided they aren’t obscuring areas of details, and overall I aim to create a higher contrast. This is especially important for the sandstone exterior of the building, as pushing the shadows accentuates all of the tiny grooves and pits in the exterior facade. This ends up creating a more three dimensional image.

Finally I play with the colours and white balance, but not as much as the other settings previously. As I noted an abundance of yellows and golds, I’ve focused on bringing those out in each image and altering the white balance accordingly also. Where other colours clash, like the green window panes, I’ve also pushed those colours up which ultimately contribute to the high contrast lighting and colour effect.

I’ve always enjoyed looking at architecture, and Building 20 is just as interesting as a lot of contemporary design in Melbourne. When approaching it in a photographic sense I considered how I want to capture the images. For the exterior I first considered the weather.

I am a big fan of high contrasts, and sunlight, so I didn’t want to take photographs of the building during a cloudy day. I tried my best to photograph all of the exterior while the sun was high and bright because the dying leaves on the trees surrounding the building create this gorgeous dappled effect over the already dappled sandstone. What you get is this heavily textured, very strong looking exterior dominated by yellows, blacks, browns, oranges, and the greens and blues that pop out of the window panes and glass.

For the most part I used an 18mm focal length to illustrate the imposing stature of the building, but I also used a 50mm prime lens to capture close up details – scratches, chips, windows, ornate sections of stone – which does well as a crisp and clear lens for detail photography. Internally I took a similar approach, and the windows that are all high up in the high ceiling rooms are bursting with light during midday. The Antechamber and Courtroom 3 in particular showed sublime lighting as the sunlight flows along the walls, over, and around all of the details on the walls.

I’ve noted a prominence of yellows (which could possibly be from the sunlight, but pretty nonetheless) and deep reds and browns in the gorgeous woodwork found all around the interior. There are lots of sharp and soft angles to work with, and I look forward to processing them.

I really enjoyed Paul Gough’s talk in class, and I feel like I took a lot of inspiration from it to consider the intention behind my individual project. Paul’s speciality is to do with memorialisation, and specifically places of memorial such as the Shrine of Remembrance, and how their design reflects what is being memorialised as well as how.

He talked about Cenotaphs, again like the one that stands in the Shrine of Remembrance, and how they act as a focal point for grief. He also noted that the walls or lists of names that are usually placed on or near these cenotaphs act as an index of collective memory, and ultimately become the point of reverence for the site of memorial.

He also talked about the life cycle of memorials, it’s creation as a place of public memory, the institutionalised date that is set for it – such as ANZAC day – and the reverence shown by not only the generation directly affected by the event being memorialised, but by following generations of children and grandchildren.

His ideas resonated with me and I feel like that my project of mapping out Building 20 directly relate to these ideas of memory, and cenotaphs; Building 20 stands quite proudly on the corner of two busy streets of Melbourne, and has done for decades, and so acts as a focal point of memory for the city.

After spending some time in Korsakow, I’ve had to reconsider the linearity of my project. Using Korsakow’s key word system, I could set up logical links, that is, set up the links so that a user would explore the place logically and methodically, as you would in real time. However, Korsakow is built around randomness, and the more I consider the existence of the building as one out of time, I thought that randomness could work quite well for the overall concept.

Rather than map the building as one of place, the capabilities of Korsakow can allow me to map it out as a place of time and memory, as something non-linear rather than physical, and euclidean. As memory is fragmented, and works based on sounds and sights that are related, Korsakow’s workflow will compliment this very well. My hopes are that with this style the building, it’s physical characteristics, and it’s existence as a piece of history will come through more readily than forcing the user to stagger through a slower paced and conventional linear gallery of images.

Returning to Korsakow now, it’s absolutely a more robust program, and doesn’t crash or screw up nearly as much as it did last time I used it last year. The interface could use a lot more work still, but once you get the hang of the input it isn’t too bad at all.

It’s still a very manual program though, particularly with audio and image files, in that once you commit a file to the program, to alter it, you would have to delete the image, re-add it into the database, and then link it to the other media again. This can be an issue if you don’t plan ahead. There’s a lot of clicking too, and navigating the program can be tiresome at times, especially on a trackpad rather than a mouse. With what I’ve worked in it so far though, it’s not been too difficult.