Encounter PDP

What have I learnt in my time at Cardiff School of Art and Design? When I started my first year in University I was a socially awkward 18 year old desperate for friends. I wasn’t confident in my identity as an artist and I had no idea what I was doing with my life. CSAD helped to grow and shape me into the confident and interesting person I am today, I would not change my time at university for anything.

Specifically talking about my final project, I set out to create a satirical piece of work winking towards the images seen in every prospectus which typically depict a very sugar coated idealistic image of university life. I wanted to highlight the grubby, grungy, and more realistic side of what it’s like to be a student in Britain. In my head I had images of parties and drugs along side images of dirt and grime. This isn’t exactly the way the project ended up going, but that’s okay. I did begin taking photos of gross bits of my house but unfortunately for me, my housemates and I are actually pretty clean and tidy. So in order for me to find the imagery I was looking for I would have to go to other peoples houses. Now unfortunately over the first term of third year I fell into a pretty deep depression due to an unhappy relationship and therefore had shut myself out from a lot of my friends (my housemates included) resulting in me not really having any strong friendships in order for me to invite myself over to other peoples houses, along with a lack of motivation for the project. Over Christmas my relationship ended and my depression with it somewhat and I felt as if new life had been breathed into me, but unfortunately at this time my father became very ill (which I have explained in a previous post) so my motivation for my work did not return.

Second term rolled around and I was ready to hit the ground running and finally start making headway on my project. I bought a new lens for my camera and this helped with my motivation because I was a lot happier with the images I was producing (I’m not exactly sure why as I’m not very good with technical camera knowledge but the images were betting quality in my opinion) At this point I was still only really taking photos of my housemates chilling around the house. We had a few parties in the house which I had planned to take long exposure photos at to avoid ethics complications, however I found I would end up too intoxicated to work the camera efficiently by the time I would have been able to take such photos. This was obviously completely my fault and I probably should have just waited for start drinking, but hey hindsight is 20/20.

By the end of second term I had rebuilt a lot of my relationships with my friends but I still hadn’t taken photos of a huge variety of different subjects, and over the Easter break my father died. This of course, did not help with my motivation for my work. At this point I decided to just take what I had and make the most of it. Little did I know that what I had was a series of images that work together very well because they all contained a similar atmosphere. They all had this very homely vibe to them whilst also depicting things are are cold and broken and a bit grimy. They all had the atmosphere of friendship and mutual struggle about them.

What I ended up with was a coherent, tightly edited series of images bound together in a photobook which has a comprehendible theme running throughout. If I were to do the project again I think I would have tried to capture activities outside of the house (pub, strike protests, etc.) as this would have provided a more well rounded idea of student life but I am still happy with the outcome of the final work as a more zoomed in view on what it’s like to be a student in Britain.

Exposure PDP

Who am I as an artist? It took me five years of school, two years of art and design at college, and two years on an illustration degree to work out that I was a photographer. As far as a professional career in such a field is concerned I think the profession that appeals to me the most is simply to be a freelance travel and portraiture photographer.

The issue with freelance work of course is that the work generally has to come to you so building a solid web presence is key. I view my professional instagram account as a gateway to my official online portfolio. As I have explained in a previous post, Instagram is a brilliant platform for getting your work seen by a large amount of people who then view your profile and can be linked to a more edited professional portfolio.

Going forward I want to create a more coherent body of work all of a similar style. As nice as it may be to be skilled at lost of different styles and techniques within the world of photography, this can lead to potential clients not knowing what exactly they will get from you and this may put them off working with you. I would like to have a more signature style to my work in order to bring clients who come to me for just that, my style of work. Of course this then limits clients in its own way as then if someone wants work done but they do not like your style they would then avoid working with you for that reason.

I have identified a few photography studios in Cardiff whos work I like and contacted them asking if there may be any opportunity for an apprenticeship or ever just a shadow placement. This would be a great way to learn about technical camera skills and all the admit that comes with being a professional photographer.

I have recently been commissioned to take photos at a wedding and for a family photoshoot. These are great opportunities for a beginning photographer, especially one who enjoys street photography as these gigs will help me become comfortable taking photos of really people (and not models) who aren’t necessarily comfortable in front of the camera. In street photography I usually take photos of strangers in public and this can be a very uncomfortable situation to be in, ‘will they notice me taking a photo?’, ‘will they be mad if the notice me taking a photo?’ of course if either of these situations happen the worse case senario would be me happily deleting the image, but as someone who suffers from social anxiety this can be a big deal.

All in all I feel incredibly confident in my work and my practice as I leave the bubble that is university and enter the (reluctantly so called) ‘real world’. This three year journey has taught me so much about what it means to be an artist and so much about myself.

Prospectus

Over the duration of this project I have takes a grand total of 410 photographs. Now of course not all of these can make it into the final edit and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t want to showcase most of them, ever. The thing about documentary photography is, in most cases, you will take a very large amount of images and only have a few that actually work for the intended purpose. In the final edit of this work there are 23 final images. I wanted to make this a tight edit of a small amount of images rather than a thick photobook with less coherent narrative. I believe each project is only as good as the worst photo so this work only showcases the images I believe work best together and contribute to the picture I was trying to paint of university life.

The work was all shot on a Canon 700D with either a 40mm lens or an 18-55mm lens. I had previous experience with my DSLR but mostly for film purposes and I only ever used to use the manual function. My photography experience was, pretty much, exclusively in 35mm black and white film. I new from the beginning I did not want the images to be black and white because I think colour is a great way to add mood and atmosphere into an image; and seeing as I wanted to create a homely feel to the project, colour was definitely the way to go. I decided on digital photography rather than film partly because film is expensive but also because I wanted to develop my technical camera skills.

When putting together a photobook it is important to think about the pairing of the images, the sequencing and the pace of the overall work. As I was creating the final edit I tried to pair images that were either from the same shoot or have visual similarities or a common theme in order to cohere the work together and not create a photo album vibe to the pages. Once I had the image pairs I began working on the sequencing of the book, this is important as it helps guide the viewer through the narrative of the work. I sequenced the work in such a way that it mirrors how student life tends to unfold. I began with images of people chilling out followed by drinking then the aftermath of a party. This was followed up with more images of being cosy and chill at home and then smoking and mild drug use. In my experience of being a student life has been very spontaneous and without reach direction most of the time and that is what I wanted to convey with the flow of the final book.

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What am I Doing?

As the second term rolled around I found myself feeling confident in my artistic presence but feeling uncomfortable with my place on an illustration course. It has taken me two years at university to decide what direction I want my art work to take and confidently say, ‘I am a photographer’. Within my current project I am exploring in university I am simply setting out to create a realistic documentation of student life through aesthetically pleasing photographic imagery. That is it. It’s that simple. A series of images taken throughout my final year at university that come together to form this photo book. However whenever I explain this to a tutor they seem to get a dazed look across their face and then proceed to ask me what the purpose of the work is. The purpose of the work is to be nothing more than what it is. A documentation. It doesn’t need to have some satirical social commentary underlining the whole project for it to be a worthy piece of art. As a documentary piece it should only have to exist to be relevant as it is a reflection on real life, and therefore should not need to be picked at and prodded in order for it to be an interesting and relevant artistic project.

Dissertation PDP

I began the new term and final year of my degree apprehensive but excited. I have never been super confident with my academic writing skills but I was excited to take up the challenge of the full 10,000 words Dissertation. The thing that worried me the most was not knowing how to cite other peoples work within my own text. I’ve never had to do this in past courses (or at least it has never affected my grade) and never done this in previous essay work at Cardiff Met, so I decided to tackle learning how to do this first. This was far easier than I thought it would be and put me in a very positive mood to tackle the daunting task of actually writing the dissertation. I had previously struggled to reach word counts on 1,000 word essays so the idea of writing 10,000 words on a single topic was, quite frankly, terrifying. I searched into Youtube the words, ‘How to write a dissertation’ as sort of a joke and also as a procrastination technique and stumbled upon a lecture about how to break down the 10,000 words into more manageable mini essays. This lecture completely eased my worries as I then broke down what exactly I wanted to put in my work and wrote out a skeleton:

Introduction (1,000) – An overview of the changes in gender politics

Part 1: The War on Gender Discrimination

• LGBTQ+ Rights
• Womens Rights
• Discrimination Against Men
• A Brief History of Transgender Society

Part 2:

• Understanding Gender
• Gender vs. Sex
• Transitions
• The ‘Real’ Woman

Part 3:

• Case Study 1 – Gender Play in School
• Case Study 2 –
• Case Study 3 –
• Case study 4 –

Conclusion (1,000)

Optional Part 4:

• Family Values and Bringing Up Children
• Psychological Impact of a Genderless Society
• Diversity of Human Bodies
• The Gender Existence Argument

 

Once I had this frame in place I had set myself the task of writing lots of short 500 word reports and the task seemed so manageable that I decided I would write 1,000 words a week in order to have my first draft completed before the end of November. I started off really well, sticking to my target. I was extremely confident in the work I was producing and got to about 3,000 words before burning myself out and hitting the wall. At this point I went about 3 more weeks without even opening the document, taking me to the interim deadline with no hope of reaching my first draft deadline. I reassessed my workload at this point as unnecessary panic set in and concluded that if I wanted to finish my first draft by the christmas break I would have to pick up my original 1,000 words a week, which I stupidly decided seemed manageable even after 3 weeks of doing no work. I began writing again and after writing another 2,000 words I burned myself out again. At list point I started to worry because I was so determine to finish the first draft before the end of term I had forgotten that that actual deadline wasn’t until 2 months later. I took a step back and decided to give myself more time to finish my first draft and setting myself a goal of writing 500 words a week plus anything else I wanted to write on top in the moment and I felt the weight lift from my shoulders.

As I was writing I had discovered that I was using case studied within the first 2 chapters as they were relevant so decided to scrap my ‘Part 3’ and replace it with my optional extra chapter. This made a lot more sense as it gave me a more direct topic to look for research. Towards the end of November I had reached about 6-7,000 words and was happy with my progress as I was setting out to reach the full 10,000 word target as opposed to the minimum 8,000, however, around this time I had a lot of personal issues pile on my family and lost all motivation to do work. When I was able to sit down and write I struggled to concentrate. I managed to write a further 1,000 words of work I was not confident in over the Christmas break and decided at this point I should apply for an extension. Once the extension was confirmed I set out to write another 1,000 words before February, leaving me 20 days to edit everything and get it ready for submission.

Looking back at how I approached the dissertation I wish I had set myself a more realistic deadline for my first draft. I think If I had set out to write 500-700 words a week with a longer deadline I wouldn’t have burnt myself out. I would have had more time to read the material without worrying that I wasn’t getting enough down in the document. In my first run at writing 1,000 words a week I was really confident in the writing. I was, for the first time in my writing career, reading material thoroughly and not just writing any old thing in order to reach the word count; but setting that unrealistic goal definitely put to much pressure on me and caused me to not produce work as successfully as I had hoped.

Despite everything I am proud of the work I am submitting as it is the most work I have put into a piece of academic writing and probably the best I have ever produced. I am confident in the final dissertation and am excited to work on my subject work with no distractions to leave university with the best grade I can achieve.

Online Presence

As any artist in this day and age should, I decided to create an online platform for my work. To begin I started off by creating a professional instagram profile for my work.

Instagram is a great platform for exposing your work to a wide range of people. I’m not sure exactly how the algorithm works, but whenever a new post goes up it takes only a few seconds for the first few likes, comments and new followers to roll in. I don’t believe many photographers get much work specifically though Instagram however, it is a great place to grow an audience of dedicated fans. The bigger your audience the further your posts reach, and the further your posts reach the higher chance of potential clients being able to view your work.

I have linked my more edited professional website through my Instagram page so if potential clients like what they see on my profile they have a way of viewing a more edited body of work.

One of Instagrams downfalls is that, for me personally, I feel like it’s more of a conveyer best of work that you have to be consistently churning out. As a result of this it can harm the end product of certain projects if the artist feels like they have to rush their work in order to get it up online.

Another great way to present photography work is through a personal website. This is a brilliant platform for really taking time to edit and curate your own work and putting it out to the world. On an artist website you can really take charge of what you put into the world, however, this platform isn’t great for exposing your work to the wider world, which is why Instagram and a Website work perfectly together.

I am trying to build an Instagram which gets my work seen by a large amount of people, who then may view my page and as a result, click the link to my website and view my individual projects.

Prologue to Term 2 and 3

Over the Christmas period my father, a nine year cancer patient, was suddenly rushed to hospital after some wounds on his leg became septic. He took up residence in the hospital for a grand total of 3 weeks, after which he was wheelchair bound so my mother became his full time carer and as I was home for the holidays I assisted as much as I could.

As term rolled around his health began to improve so I felt comfortable enough to come back to Cardiff but at this point I hadn’t touched any of my work over the break. I lost momentum with my project and instead of seeking out the best photographs I could take I mostly just stayed home and took photos of my housemates. (More in depth analysis of the work itself in a future post)

My lack of motivation for the work and the distractions of my home life left me neglecting pretty much all development work over second term. In the last week I was told my father was going to die. We were looking at a few weeks to a few months at most. Five days later he was dead. Everything happened so quickly I wasn’t really sure how to process it all. I still don’t think I have processed it now as I’m writing this on May 9th 2018. At this point I think I just went into auto pilot, I realised how much work I had neglected and set out to catch up. I didn’t have time to create an in depth political insight into the life of students that I had originally set out to but I did have time to take what I already had and make the most of it; and I have made a project I am proud to have created.

 

Term 1 Reflection

When I began this project I wanted to first experiment with whether I wanted to use digital or film photography. Regardless of how much I enjoy the process of developing film I came to the conclusion very early on that if I were to go about using film then I would have to shoot in black and white as this is free to develop on campus and there was no way I could afford to keep up the cost of developing colour film. I knew I wanted to play with colour and lighting in my images so decided to tackle shooting digital. After this decision was made I decided to focus my camera skills and get more familiar with Adobe Lightroom, as I hadn’t really looked at digital photography in too much depth before.

I felt like I picked up the basics on Adobe Lightroom pretty quickly and even learnt some more advanced photo editing techniques, but I don’t feel like there is an overall coherence to my images yet. At this stage that isn’t too much of an issue but over the break I want to try and develop my images into one collection rather than individual images I have just put together.

Looking back at my images from this term I have concluded a few things.

• I am better at taking photographs in bright natural light so I need to work on what camera settings work best for me in low light in order to create a dynamic range of different images.
• If I am to take photos at parties I need to either stay sober to produce the best images, or find a way to make the ‘shakiness’ of the images work to my advantage
• As much as my Lightroom skills have come along since I first started using it I still don’t see my images as professional looking photographs. I need to figure out the perfect balance between what camera skills i need and what editing skills I need.

When thinking about my professional development over this term I definitely put that side of things on the back burner. I played around in Sqarespace with two different website layouts and set up a business instagram account but as stated earlier I don’t have any work that I feel looks professional enough to put on a website of professional blog. I hope to create work for this purpose over the second half of this module. I also created an online shop via Big Cartel on which I plan on selling zines based off this project.

Going forwards I plan to:

• Develop my photographic style via in camera and editing techniques
• Play with time by using polaroid style film
• Develop my work to a standard I am happy to put on a website in order to advertise my practice
• Create mini zines for the subtopics within student life

Lightroom Development

Colour Theory in Photography

The following video was produced by Mango Street Photography, who have been a huge inspiration for me when learning about different photography techniques.

 

Mango Street tend to produce fashion and travel photography where I am aiming for documentary photography. This video highlights the use of colour in photographs and why it is important to consider when setting up a shot. However, as a documentary photographer it is not exactly possible to set up a shot in the same way as a fashion photographer would. With fashion you pick the outfit, location, time of day and model within the image before hand. With documentary this is far more difficult are the photographer is trying to capture real life situations.

When looking into colour theory as a documentary photographer it is more prominent in post production and editing changing the hue, saturation and luminance of an image is how I would apply colour theory to my work.