Tutor Feedback & Key Learnings

I recieved feedback from my tutor on Assignment 1, and it was broadly in line with my own self-assessment, which is a good start. The summary of the key learnings, placed in my order of importance, are:

1. Make sure I stick strictly to the assignment. Assignment 1 is all about visual differences between images, but I included some pairs of images where the differences were not visual but were more ambiguous. Partly I think this was because I had been reading The Photograph by Graham Clarke and had tried to impart some deeper meaning to some of the images.(see here). Anyway, I have Assignment 2 printed out and pinned above my desk now as a constant reminder!
2. Try not to mix different styles (i.e. black and white and colour) in one piece, try to keep a theme/narrative going throughout the piece.
3. Be careful before using a form of manipulation - especially HDR as this can look 'contrived', and was not really suitable for this assignment.
4. Bring in more references to research and particularly other photographers' work into this blog.
5. I presented the images and notes in a photobook, and whilst this is good method of presentation it makes re-shooting and re-editing, following your tutors feedback, costly and time-consuming. Better perhaps to use a more flexible format, but possibly then consider a photobook for formal assessment.
6. Pre-visualising often helps to foster other ideas when shooting.
7. Be careful to not to have images that are too similar - I included two images of logs where one is simply a closer crop of the other - in hindsight this was perhaps a little lazy.
8. Don't worry too much about equipment - smartphone images can work well.
9. Be realistic about deadlines and allow time for editing.

References

Clarke, G. 1997. The photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Key Learning - Assignment 1

One of my key learnings from the first assignment in 'Art or Photography' is how pre-visualising and sketching images before the 'execution' - the act of actually capturing the photograph - is that often this preparation leads to quite unexpected results which are often better than the pre-visualisation. Here's two examples:

This idea for 'curves':

Became:

Curves

This idea for 'lines':

Became:

Lines

I am not quite sure what's happening here, but it's not the first time this has happened to me. One theory is that by having sketched out some ideas, subconsciously I can relax and in so doing become more receptive to other ideas - both the images above were obvious but I never noticed them until I tried to capture the ideas I had sketched out.

It's a bit like when you try to remember something but no matter how hard you try, you cannot. Then, later, when you are thinking about something completely different, the thing you were trying to remember just pops into your head.