Final images and some thoughts

While I struggled with the initial 'bigness' of the "light" concept - as I have with every other brief, I feel like I got into this one faster and narrowed down my concept earlier so I could focus on just one topic.

I enjoyed shooting this one despite the time pressure becuase it let me explore one object under different conditions. This was especially good as it was an object I have extremely easy access too and is somthing that I hold close to my heart. 

I also enjoyed having the oppourtunity to explore black and white images again as this was where my photographic interest initially lies and is the form which I first started learning about photography in.

On the whole, as this is going to be my last post, I've enjoyed this course, it's given me some interesting insights into the design school, and has lent my a greater understanding towards my friends when they say they have a massive project due. This has been like nothing else I have experienced in my University career.

All the best.

My favourite

This image doesnt fit in my series, nor is it one of the most photographically fantastic images I have prodcued however I am strangely attracted to it...

Final Proposal information

Final proposal;

Exploring the bed in a variety of states of “undress” through landscape.  

A persons bed is likely a place that they both spend a lot of time and often wish they could spend more. For many people their bed is an intimate place, one where they can escape the rest of the world, where they can rest, where they dream and on a purely physical level one where they sleep with others. Your bed is a place that fills needs that other places cannot. When people dream about beds it is said to represent security and safety.  

On a metaphorical level, a bed can be very representative of a person. Undressed, all beds comprise of the same elements; a very basic bed may be only be made up of a mattress. More advanced beds may entail foam, springs, slats and legs. But every bed has a mattress. Mattresses represent physicality.  Ultimately, every human has a body – on the whole they comprise of the same things and humanity is at a very basic level very uniform. This will be shown through images of a mattress; uniformity, repetition  

From that point people dress themselves; both physically with clothing, but also emotionally, through personality, experience and those who they associate themselves with.

How well that “dressing” holds up to the pressure of the world, the tosses and turns of the sleeping body, will show up in the end. Crinkled and creased sheets. At the end of the day, we have to throw off the “costume” and show the state we are in as individuals.

Imogen

Imogen Cunninghams work



My imitation



Like Martina

These images were taken in my and my brothers childhood bedrooms ( we both wanted blue...but a different blue each time). I wanted to imitate Martina Mullaney's turn in series however these are the only bedrooms I know of with brightly coloured walls.....

making progress?

Its becoming obvious that making a series of images of this subject is going to prove hard.....

Artist inspiration

A variety of artists have used similar mediums as the one I plan to use with this project. I have drawn inspiration from:

Originally, when I was looking as using people as landscape objects i looked into Kim Weston and Karin Rosenthal. I enjoy that both of these artists' use of black and white, which was what I studied in the first time I studied photography at school. I enjoy how it can say a lot while still being extremely simple; that it is both classic and modern at the same time.

Karin Rosenthal

 



Kim Weston



After talking to Matt, I expored what other artisits used to create landscapes. I enjoyed Sian Bonnell's use of food and Laura Letinskys lack of food. I think if I had more time I would expole this idea more. Using food as landscapes. Imagine a whole city scape of foods...a dark and somewhat muted cityscape in chocolate in comparsion to the bright and colourful world of fruit and veges. I imagine that would require both a lot of time, financial investment and space amoungst other things; like huge amounts of creative vision. 



Lauras work quickly took me toward Martina Mullaneys "Turn in" series. This series created my focus on beds as a subject. While my work does not have the depth that Martinas does - she studied lonliness and introspection through the beds at homeless shelters in the UK, i enjoyed the simplicity of her images. I liked her use of colour - ususally somthing associated with happiness and joy in such a contrasting situation. However, I know of very few bedrooms with such brightly coloured walls which I could access in the short period of time which this project was running over. I did however return to my childhood home (where my parents still live) and take some images including my bright blue bedroom walls.

Leading on from Marinas images I got to thinking about Tracy Emin (we talked about her during the time project) and her "Unmade bed" exibition. This show piece discussed the intamicy of a persons bed, and the things that go on not only in bed but in the room a bed is kept. While searching for her work, I was also reminded of Imogen Cunninghams work "The Unmade Bed" which was my most relevent precedent. I enjoy that Imogens image is something that people surely see almost every day, without realising it.




Tracy Emin

Imogen Cunningham - Unmade Bed



Strangely, while searching "unmade bed" I also discovered that Sonic Youth, an American band who first formed in the early 80's have a song by the same name:

"A man like thats like an unmade bed" the song discusses the return to a harmful relationship. Is that the bed? Who knows, for some an unmade bed is a thing to shy away from, everyone always talks about getting into a freshly made bed with clean sheets, but for some, the return to an unmade bed is comforting and soothing. Similar to going to your mum for a hug.

To end, Im going to explore this idea of landscapes in bed. I will be using Black and White and I will explore the bed and the sheets on it in a number of ways.

Shoot 1

Light

Light – Abstraction / transformation

Object: Ordinary items  > Landscapes

Using light to create valleys and peaks in ordinary items to create landscapes.

Currently I have 3 items I'm playing with...

1. Human body. Artist Precedents include Karin Rosenthal and Kim Weston
2. Bedspreads. Artisit Precendent Martina Mullaney
3. Food as landscapes. Artisit Precendents include Laura Letinsky and Sian Bonnell

Final thoughts

I stuggled through the assignment. Not because I didnt enjoy it, but because it was time consuming, and I had bigger and better ideas that I could not seem to put into realities. The joys of a "struggling artist".

On the whole, after watching hours of stop motion on youtube, I would like to think that I did not do as poorly as some postings, but I am also in no rush to put my video on a public forum, because I know how much better it could be.

On the whole, I am proud of myself for not falling back onto my original proposal and sticking through with this one. Now I can say I have done a stop motion (and probably never do one again...)

Time Final

Final Stop motion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTSUpe45cbg

Final Proposal information

As I discussed with my tutorial on thursday, while actually attempting to do this assignment I realised just how vauge my "train of thought" proposal was. With the images I already had at that point I decided to focus more on how time is spent. Utimately Time is something that everyone has the same amount of. Every person has 24 hours or 1440 minutes each day. How they spend this is up to them with obvious exceptions for the time spent doing things that they HAVE to, but even those things - work, chores etc, are ultimatly choices.
So that was the track I ran down for the rest of the assignment.

If I had explored this idea weeks ago, I would have decided to compare my day with that of someone else, or even compare two of my own days, one where I am at uni and another where I am at work. However, because this development came to me so late I have just stuck to how I have spent one day, although I only feature in the final stop motion once; as the owner of the creative mess, which now resembles less of a "creatve mess" and more of a daily diary.

Fast and slow images - Time hand in requirement

It occured to me that I never put up the images we took in the first week on the time topic.

I found the slow shutter speed excercise much harder than the fast but this might be because I was waiting to get my tripod back from a friend. I had to lean to keep the camera still which is why I chose this location (on the city to sea bridge) as there was somewhere I could wedge myself into to take the long exposure.

The fast shutter speed image was a bit of a flook - a right place, right time, camera ready to go kind of moment.

Actual movement

So this is looking like the beginning of my stop motion............ Just a small bite-sized piece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i-0HKBkp4M

GIF

This is just a trial to see some of my own images in something similar to stop motion.

I havnt used GIF before so who knows whats going to show up.

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So that didnt work. But I can see it if i open it on the PC, so I have an idea of what it looks like. Ive also been using Windows Movie maker just to quickly string together long series of images and get the same idea. I think this stop motion is going to prove very bumpy/jumpy and not smooth and seamless like the ones I have seen, inlcuding Blublu's big bang. Obviously I am neither as skilled, nor as time heavy.....

Will try again later.

Fish n chips - the demise of the paper

This was a quick shoot because the weather closed in very quickly. I had to battle with very windy conditions as well as very hungry birds.

I wanted to continue with the news paper as a mechanism of time and show that yesterdays news is nothing - it may be seen as worthless or irrelevant. Again "todays news is tomorrows fish and chip paper.

Because I was in such as hurry i really struggled to get the look I wanted, but I think the idea comes across. Again, but keeping the camera on a tripod I could enure the background stayed static while the forground changed.

I am hoping to ntergrate the birds into this sequance but am aware that they are goingto be extremely hard to capture good stop motion images of.

Coffee and paper

I enjoyed doing this shoot - Using a setting like this meant that while the background was static the forground could move and change more obviously. This is a technique that is obvious in the Her morning elegance stop motion, wher the bed stays constant and static as a background for the change and motion of the foreground.

n this shoot i really wanted to use the objects I chose for 3 reasons.
1) The coffee cup as an "easy" stop motion tool and it features in many stop motion videos on youtube
 

2) in "A Creative Mess" one of the images in the mess of photos that stands out most for me is the coffee cup

3) The newspaper has that element of time and how quickly time renders information useless or irelevent. "todays news paper is tomorrows fish and chip wrapper." This is the concept that will be shown in my next shoot. 

Some things that I found hard show up on the first contact sheet. To get the dancing quality of the cup i needed to use wire and hand movement to make it move while the camera (using a timer and a multiple image setting) took 4 photos. On contact sheet one you can see both my hand and the wire quite blatantly, which could be photoshopped but would be better if there werent present at all. 

My hand appeares again on sheet 4 but this is just a sign on my impatiance and desire to get thigs done quickly. 

Contact Sheets - ideas

 

Proposal two:Stop Motion. April 22

Stop motion is used to give often solid items the illusion of movement. It has been present in cinematography for over 100 years and involves multiple frames being taken with slight adjustments in each then played as a fast and continuous sequence.  Stop motion has been used in both films and often in children’s TV but recently has appeared in popular culture on the internet in the form of user videos which are often found on youTube.  In fact, if you type Stop Motion in to youTube you will generate about 850,000 hits. While some of these are vey basic many of them are extremely intricate. Artist PES has 26 Stop motion videos he has created alone, and has near 100,000 subscribers to his channel. This shows how stop motion is still very much in the eye of the public still. In 2009 the video clip for “Her Morning Elegance” by Oren Lavine become a pop-art phenomena and one of the most successful stop motion videos ever. It earned a nomination in the 52nd Grammy Awards and has been screened at film festivals around the world. The video was created from 2096 still photographs that were shot and sequenced to create the sense of movement.

Her Morning Elegance can be viewed at:
http://www.hmegallery.com/

Stop motion is said to be one of the most simple and fun animation techniques, and with the high presence of digital cameras in society now this may be the reason it is so prevalent on youTube. However, being a student who is not especially creative this also seems like it could be a good way for me to do something that I perceive as quite hard to create when I watch this type of video.   

One of the most basic  things that I am going to struggle with while completing this project is  my utter lack of patience. Taking anywhere between 5 and 10 images per second of video is going to be a frustratingly slow process, however, I will try and over come this to get through this project.

Another struggle will be showing what i want to show. As of yet I do not really know what this is. I have a vague idea from which to start, but from there I hope it will develop.

My initial idea is: The time it takes a thought train to pass.

This has come from my experience in trying to come up with an idea surrounding time as a photographic concept. One idea leads to another which leads to another. Sometimes through very obvious links and other times through very random associations. I wish to explore time through its relationship with other ideas in a persons day, and show how time is ultimately related to everything.

The thinking behind this has come from a photo titled “A creative mess”. This shows a camera behind a mans head and as if it were a gun shooting him, the ideas have come out the front of his head, like blood splatter on a wall. When i go to emulate this photo I will be using this as my thought train, and each thought will be linked to the next.  



Creative Mess (2007) Highverbalfan



I have also been watching some stop motion videos to check out techniques and get ideas:

This final video ( day in the life of a student) seems to be what I should aim for as far as professionality and style. Its also a topic I can easily relate to.

Proposal one: Ephemerality April 12

The word Ephemeral is defined as “Lasting a very short amount of time” examples that are given are fashions, certain plants or insects and sensations. Ephermerality in the world of photography is the capture of a fleeting second, that single moment in time, for example a bubble bursting or a curl of smoke from a cigarette. Taking photographs of ephemeral objects is a way of slowing down if not stopping time, to create a “forever” image of something that will never last forever.

In my own work, I wish to show that moment when ‘something happens’ – a bubble bursts, a wave wipes away writing in the sand, a cup falls over.....

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It occurs to me that to create a succinct series of photographs I will need to think of a very specific moment which could produce a set of 4 images. My first thoughts are of bubbles bursting or the smoke of a cigarette but I could also “create” ephemeral moments in the way that (above artist precedent) does.  I could create a jumping sequence, or a falling sequence but this will require a model which can be hard, as I know everyone is busy, including myself. I may also require some aerodynamic skills and equipment that I don’t have; harnesses, ropes, spaces to hang people from and the like.

I think for this idea I could take inspiration from photographers such as Henri Cartier-Brensson:

I think both of these show that "fleeting moment" very very well. Nothing is posed but everything is perfect. I imagine this man as someone who had his camera around his neck everywhere he went, just in case he saw something brilliant.

Lucas Blalock also shows that fleeting moment, using layering to show a change in time extremely quickly. Also showing a woman being naked while also being clothed.

I cant describe what it is about this image that I like so much, but I am just so attracted to it.

A long time coming...

What is time?

Time is always happening and cannot be stopped no matter how hard we try. The concept is self evident. Minutes are made up of seconds, hours of minutes, days of hours and so forth and we watch this happen using clocks, diarys, newspapers and calanders. Despite all of this, we cannot say what happens as  time passes. Time can sometimes only be represented by change. Change can occur in a matter of seconds or over a much longer period of time. In the past time was a sacred, religious and often ritualistic object. Is that the case now? Maybe.

 Time  may also be viewed as a social construct. Despite the fact that time is a set of measurable units,  it is not always perceived in the same way. Time seems to go faster when you are with friends, or as the saying goes “when you are having fun”. 5 extra minutes in bed in the morning is far more valuable than 5 extra minutes on the bus, or in class. Conversely, when time drags is often when we lack stimulation or are waiting expectantly for somthing exciting or at least worth looking forward to.

In some situations time has no place for a reason. Casinos purposefully have no clocks, no windows and often no closing time.  Other places seem to have nothing if not time, airport lounges, train stations, gyms. Even people can be classed by time; the Fast-paced and always busy people in comparison to those lazy or laid back people. In fact, time can, to different people be a huge economic commodity. I myself get paid by the hour, therefore an hours wages or the value of my time can either be spent, saved or shared.  

Some societies do not even have words to communicate the difference between past and future. Time is not a liner construct but rather a collection of memories and dreams which are added to the human experience as life goes on. In contrast many societies can very specifically communicate the distance of time that has passed or will pass between events.  

For many people now our western version of time; minutes, hours and days, dictate to us how and when we live our lives. We do not listen to our biological clock because out ticking watch or numbers on the wall say it is “too early to go to sleep” or “too late for breakfast.” We are ignoring the natural and most long term clock for the one that tells us when the news is on TV or when we have to go to work.

Time is, for some, (myself included) a topic of near constant worry.... Do I have enough time to do what I want? Am I running late? Am I using my time most efficiently? Why do I insist on wasting time?...and so on and so on. This often leads me to think about different kinds of sayings that we use or are exposed to every day that are based on societies thoughts about time: quality time, time is of the essence, running out of time, time management, time is money, killing time, it is about time, take time for yourself, time will heal, time’s up, dinner time, bedtime, time waits for no man, the time of your life and the list goes on. Time is a commodity – it is big business.