Trying my hand at Architecture

Sunday morning, bright blue skies and I pick all the buildings in the shade! First time I've gone out with my camera with the sole intention of shooting architecture. So here goes, heres a few of the pics I shot. Theres also a sneaky one I took at college today!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Documentary - Children in politics

On Saturday 9th February the local people of Levenshulme went out in force to protest about the closing of the local Library and Swimming pool, I went along with my camera to document it. What struck me the most about this protest was the amount of children "obviously with their parents" who where actively involved.
Where would our children be without a library to read books? The olympics stirred up a whole new appetite for sports, on the back of this the government adopted its "The Olympics Legacy" and then they plan to close swimming pools and leisure centres.
So here are a few photos of the children of the day.......

Interior Brief final & Overview

I choose the Catholic Church as my interior brief. Being brought up as a catholic, the thing I remember most from an early age is being absolutely petrified of the local priest and the church in general, church was always freezing cold, dark and damp and I wanted to be anywhere on a Sunday morning than sat on a hard wooden pew, freezing cold having to put half my hard earned pocket money into a tray for the poor. Initially I wanted to portray the church as I saw it growing up, cold, damp and frightening. What changed? I spoke to the most helpful priest in the world, who bent over backwards to help me and I felt myself not wanting to portray his church in that way or maybe it was just age old catholic guilt! So the final 10 images show from my 7 year old self what the church and my faith meant to me growing up. The icons and items of everyday church life, from Mary and Jesus to baptism and confession, from collections for the poor to the splendor and richness of the church itself.

The lighting was an absolute nightmare and I shot various exposures for each photo. I didn't want to use flash as this bounced off every available surface and I lost the ambience of the church. I feel the images are composed well and I've achieved in my minds eye what I set out to achieve. I'm disappointed that some of the stain glass windows didn't show up as well but I could only achieve this on some occasions if I totally underexposed the rest of the scene and by doing this I lost a lot of the detail. A couple of images of the church itself have been deliberately under exposed to compensate for the windows.

The bible photo is a bit over exposed and isn't all quite in frame so I would use a different exposure next time and get it all in frame.

The statue of our lady I should of in hindsight used a shallow depth of field to blur out the background but the use of flash as slightly compensated for this as it's brought out her face from the background as I wanted to give her a more life like and dare I say angelic feel as opposed to a rock hard statue. The Jesus statue didn't work out as well and I'd possibly shoot from a different angle next time.

The more I photograph the more I seem to be leaning to searching out the small random details that by some would go totally unnoticed but that I find fascinating, so we have the collection for the poor sign, the organ keys, Mary and Jesus done as portraits instead of statues, the opened bible.

Still a lot to learn, but I feel I did the best I could with the lighting conditions I had and I'm quite happy with the results.

BLOGGER WON'T LET ME UPLOAD PHOTOS AT MOMENT

Exterior location - final & overview

To show in 10 images our understanding of "exterior location".

I chose to photograph a subject "water" as opposed to doing all landscapes for example. What I wanted to show is how water comes in all different forms and how it is used and needed in life.

In my 10 images I have incorporated depth of field, shutter speeds, field of view etc.

I haven't edited the images so they are all straight from camera.

Here are the 10 final images, these aren't the ones I chose as I printed off the wrong file but you can still see from the images my planned intentions.

My thoughts........I hate them! The main obstacle being Me! Getting to know all the various settings etc, I found I was thinking too much about the technical element of photography rather than the creative element, which frustrated the hell out of me, this led to me missing out a lot of the basics, use of a tripod, rule of thirds being 2 of the main failures. On a more positive note, i know where I went wrong and as I'm now more confident with the camera than when took these, I'm now creating images I want to create as opposed to panicking and shooting whatever!

Dunstable Downs - Practising Exterior Location!

 

Saturday afternoon on Dunstable Downs Quickly went from bright blue skies to peeing down rain. It was windy as hell and freezing cold, I could hardly press down the shutter it was that cold. I played around with various apertures, shutter speeds and ISO's, Theres even a Martin Parr inspired image!  Although some of the photos are the wrong exposure I feel this adds to the images as it takes into account the mood of the day.

 

Here are just a few images from the day, as always unedited ( Photoshop is in the post!) & randomly selected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photographer Research - Simon Roberts

 

 

Simon's photographs have been exhibited widely, with recent shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai and are held in a number of private and corporate collections, including the Deutsche Börse Art Collection, the George Eastman Kodak House and the Wilson Centre for Photography. He has been published in national and international magazines including Granta, The Sunday Times Magazine, Guardian Weekend Magazine, Next Level, Saturday Telegraph Magazine, Details, Art Review, Esquire, Der Spiegel and Le Monde.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On first glancing a few images I wasn't too impressed until I looked at them all in detail, The images "We English" as I've shown above, depicts in Photographs a part of English outdoors and leisure activities, from the sweeping landscapes and the people in them as a collective rather than individuals, it shows in a range of images our oddities and customs, from car boots to seaside, birdwatching to surfing he shows our obsession with caravans, alcohol, sports, picnics , BBQ's etc

Photographer Research - Jane Evelyn Atwood Specialist location

Jane Evelyn Atwood is one of the world’s leading photojournalists. In 1976, Atwood bought her first camera and began taking pictures of a group of street prostitutes in Paris. It was partly on the strength of these photographs that Atwood received the first W. Eugene Smith Award, in 1980, for another story she had just started work on: blind children. Prior to this, she had never published a photo.
In the ensuing years, Atwood has pursued a number of carefully chosen projects-among them an 18-month reportage of one regiment of the Foreign Legion, following the soldiers to Beirut and Chad; a four-and-a-half-month story on the first person with AIDS in France to allow himself to be photographed for publication in the press (Atwood stayed with him until his death); and a four-year study of landmine victims that took her to Cambodia, Angola, Kosovo, Mozambique and Afghanistan-always with the same personal and passionate approach.
Jane Evelyn Atwood’s work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, or choose to ignore. She limits her stories to those which truly compel her, devoting to each subject the time necessary-in some cases, years-to explore it in depth. In 1989 she started to photograph incarcerated women, eventually managing to gain access to some of the world's worst penitentiaries and jails, including death row. This monumental ten-year undertaking- encompassing forty prisons in nine countries of Europe and Eastern Europe, and the United States-remains the definitive photographic work on women in prison to date.
Jane Evelyn Atwood describes her method of work as "obsessive". She does not move on to a new subject until she feels she has completely understood the one at hand and her own relation to it, and until she believes that her pictures reflect this understanding.

I love the way she captures human emotion through her photographs, often shooting in black and white this gives her images a more dramatic and edgy feel. I haven't quite made up my mind if its the subject matter that draws me to this photographer or the strength of her photographs

Biblography - Jane Evelyn Atwood