constructing clouds: assessments

Assessment Task 2

Camera Controls - shutter speed

1. Explore a concept by experimenting with subject matter and shutter speed. Keep a record of this by printing your experiments as contact sheets.

2. Based on your observations produce a series of around 10 black & white photographs (prints) that use shutter speed to best express your concept.

Write a small 200 word explanation of what you are doing and how it affects the qualities of your imagery.

Journey
discovering mark-making with light
a journey is a line...

The Journey series is a constructed trip in a moving car. It was my discovery of mark making with light that expressed the concept of time passing quickly. The blurred images give the idea of a speeding journey. There are small clear glimpses of focus, perhaps of the things we remember.

Explanation: 393 words

Life is a passage of time ever moving forward and one can't help but wonder at its progress. Snapshots are memories of time past captured to remember.

The concept for this series of fourteen photographs evolved after taking photographs from a car window while it travelled on different local roadways. It was a revelation to discover the patterns and textures created by the blurred light and shade of the passing landscape captured at speed. The abstracted streaking of the vegetation is a glimpse of liquid landscape textures melted by inhabiting a speeding vehicle with a camera sensor made sleepy by using slow ISO. For me the images became memories of fleeting views of a journey that had been.

The Journey sequence is constructed from three different road trips, and begins with an image containing a corrugated iron fence. This is symbolic of construction and therefore became the starting point for leaving home, accelerating to the destination through undulating landscape and dense bush that opens to grassland and finally water at the end of the trip, where the focus becomes sharper as the journey slows.

When travelling at speed the landscape changes. The vegetation verges can be close or distant or with layers of land forms in between. The roads can be narrow or wide, which changes the perspective of how much road, vegetation or distance is captured. Driving speeds change and so does the image texture and focus. Through the speed-blurred trees in the foreground, glimpses can be found of distant focused views framed by the passing bush, some expansive, some barely revealed. Symbolic of any journey, we only have clear memories of small glimpses. We can't remember every detail. Memories have fuzzy edges.

Although the set of images is made up of separate snapshots, the intention is to view them in a sequence from 1-14, which gives the suggestion of travel at speed. When viewed as a filmstrip each image is also connected by a vague linear undulating thread suggesting the rhythm of travelling the inclines and dips of a road trip.

The value of this set of photographs to me is in the journey of arriving at the final concept, developing the sequence and seeing them printed, rather than producing technically proficient images. I feel that I am holding a palmful of mist with which I could construct a cloud.

DN+

Assessment Task 1

Camera Controls - aperture and focus

1. Explore a concept by experimenting with subject matter and aperture/focus. Keep a record of this by printing your experiments as contact sheets.

2. Based on your observations and experiments, produce 10 black & white images that use depth of field to best express your concept.

Write a small 200 word explanation of what you are doing and how it affect the qualities of your imagery.

Domestic Reflections

Explanation:

I enjoy the elegance of simplicity, and this is often the reason I am attracted to a potential subject. I find myself drawn to dramatic light and shade in the first instance, and subjects with strong form that can be wrapped by light and also give deep shadows and that contain pattern, rhythm and compositional balance.

For this assessment task I began by looking back at some of the classic photographers that I admire for the elegant beauty and simplicity of their image making such as Edward Weston and Max Dupain. Rather than venturing out to find inspiration, I decided to look more closely at my home environment, using the qualities of reflected light shade and reflections at different times of day. The idea was inspired by Olive Cotton's Tea Cup Ballet, where the image transcends the domestic subject matter.

My house has natural light that comes in through large windows around the house as well as through skylights in the ceilings. The light falls on benches and floors at various angles at different times of the day. I have always been fascinated by the reflective patterns of light in my house, and I decided to use these opportunities of light play to find my images. By adopting some interesting angles to look at domestic objects from an intimate view point was an opportunity to see what sort of depth of field could be achieved with my camera using aperture controls and shutter speed.

Because of the low light conditions indoors I bought a tripod to support using slow shutter speeds. I experimented with chasing the quickly changing light conditions when the sun and clouds played their games, but the in the end considered the cup photographs, which was the spark of the idea, the least successful in the assessment task and did not include one.