Portrait of a stranger.

Portrait of a stranger.

     For this week's tasks we was shown photographs and links for videos of photographic artists of Thomas Ruff, Iven Penn, Mark Hobbs and Tom Woods to study and to take inspiration from. This gave me a chance to use my Christmas presents properly for the first time and was quite eager to go out.

     The venue I choose to do this task is our local park (as we are still in lockdown) as this was the place nearby that I would see people going along with their daily exercise. I used my recently acquired walkabout lens as I did not know what focal length I would need so this lens would be sufficient for anything from a wide angle to long telephoto. This would cover most things (except a shallow depth of field). 

                       

     The first photograph was of 2 people walking their dogs in the park. I took this photograph at the maximum focal length that the lens was capable of. This gave me the ability to keep a long distance away without disturbing the individuals involved in their everyday business. I find it is a good method to use when you want to take photos of people whilst, they are unaware of you taking photographs of them.

                        

     The other two photographs I used on this blog was using the lens at it's shortest focal length. A good way of taking photographs of strangers I found was to point the camera upwards towards the trees and have the subject on the bottom of the photograph. Not only does the subject thinks that you are just taking some photographs of trees but I found out it is a good method of incorporating the surroundings in context with the subject. This gives a pleasing result to the overall photograph once you get used to it.

     Another method I did find useful was to take a photograph of people walking after the have passed you. Generally people don't mind having their backs taken (as you are not taking a picture of their faces) and generally don't lead to any confrontation. I did find out that this lens I could use directly in sunlight without much flare so I was lucky to take a photograph with the direction towards the sun.

     Overall I like this task. This task went hand in hand with the type of photographs I take anyway so I was already familiar in what I wanted to achieve (even though I was not familiar with the equipment I was using). I was lucky to have a day when the sun came out without having most of the snow melted and took full advantage of this day to try my Christmas presents.
 

  

Studio Staged.

      For this short assignment we were given a lecture and was shown and given links from various artists to give us some inspiration into completing this task. This included the likes of Christopher Nunn, Alix Marie and Tom Hunter. After doing a bit of research into these artists, it gave me some inspiration into trying to take some photos around the house to use as a studio. As some of these photos were of an documentary type, I decided to go in that direction (even though the first photo was in the true sense staged).

      The first photo is of our cat Daisy. It was taken strait after the lecture we had. She likes to take comfort in articles of clothing that we have been wearing and in this case she decided to settle down on my dressing gown. I took this photo by  calling her name and as soon as she looked up I shot this picture. I must admit that I am quite lucky with our cat as she is now used to me taking photographs of her and now she is used to me pointing a camera in her face and at the most part just carries on with her life as normal (apart from this photograph). The other two that I have included in this photoshoot are of my son and daughter doing their normal activity during this time of lockdown.

      The first photo is of my son. At the time he was doing some live commentary onstream of people playing some video games. I tried just to use the light that he uses when he vlogs to give the photograph some character. It was a capture of a moment of time and encapsulates the event that he was hosting.

      The last photograph is of my daughter looking into her phone on her bed. She is the messiest of us all and does not like a cover on her eiderdown or her mattress (as I put on new dressing on numerous occasions only for her to rip them all off again). Again, I just caught her in her doing the things she does normally as I thought I would make a nice picture.

      Overall I quite liked doing this task. The interpretation of what makes a studio is very broad so I could just take what was going on around me. This gave me the flexibility to capture what was going on around me and gave me a huge range on what I could do. 
  
 

Self Portrait

      Unfortunately this assignment came at a bad time for me as we were going through a personal family tragedy and I am not in the best frame of mind to really concentrate on matters at hand. However, to complete this assignment, I still tried something that would show some of the emotions that I am feeling at the moment and try something small.

      As I am in a bereaved state of mind, I thought I come up with something simple to create. A couple of years ago I was given a present of some attachment lenses for my phone. I used these apparatus a couple of times before my last phone packed up and have hardly used them since. I thought I give these lenses a try out as they just screw onto a bracket which in turn clips onto the edge of my phone. This is the first time I have used the front camera on my phone with these attachments.

      What I did find out is that, unlike the rear camera on my phone, I could not zoom in or out with the front camera and the result was so much vignetting that it took almost a circular image. Rather than give up on this project I decided to try to use this to my advantage.

      The first picture I used is to try to recreate the pain I was feeling in pictorial form. I used the radial extension to create the shimmering effect around my nose and mouth and tried to capture the inward screaming that I am feeling within my head. I tried to capture this feeling in a moment in time.

      The second photo I took was to try to show my emotion from my eye into pictorial form. I used the same radial attachment to come up with this effect.

      The last photo in this series I used the 5 point kaleidoscope attachment and moved the phone around to get the desired effect. This is an attempt to encapsulate the disjointed feelings that are running through my mind. 

      Overall, due the mixed emotions that I am in the process of going through, I really cannot say critically whether or not this is a personal refection of my mood. I hope it is and I hope that it shows it in pictorial representation and my time was not wasted.