Thursday 6 September 2012

Some Early Images

Now that I have a graphics tablet, work can begin in earnest on making images. First, here's a couple of images I made a few weeks back based off of an early morning photoshoot of which you've seen one photograph already (as this blog becomes more established, I will upload all the work, except perhaps the vast bulk of raw photographs, I have so far done for this project, reformatting it as necessary). 

As you can see, images  are probably the area that needs the most work...

 



This is really just a treated and slightly touched up photograph. I am always drawn to the sky as a compositional element in photographs, especially when the sky is beautiful (it was observing the sky as I went to take my recycling out that made me decide to go on an early morning photographic expedition). Since I have never been formally trained in photography past the AS level (most of which was about film speeds, darkroom work and other obsolete subjects) I don't particularly know if there's a name for this, or whether it's a dreadful cliche or something (though I guess I could find out). I quite liked the original photograph because of the strong composition against the sky and the way the text is framed, among other things, and was also drawn to it because it's one of the only early morning pics I snapped with a person in it.


This one picks up off the last one, tracing the rooflines. It and the previous one suffer from being too dark, which doesn't really fit in to the overall theme of Vectis (I know my supervisor is terribly worried about me making the visual theme of the work too 'punk' and 'dark German expressionist', which is admittedly where my aesthetic tastes tend to lie). Some dark images, in the sense of colour balance rather than imagery, probably won't go amiss, but it's finding the appropriate style that's the problem. This next image, made now in the glorious era of the new tablet, is still dark (being another iteration of that central picture above that we have seen before in photographic form) and could be called expressionist, but is lighter in terms of its feeling and energy.


Bit of Hockney-channeling there, and he'd approve of the tracing, what with his old masters-camera obscura theory. In many ways, I'm using the graphics tablet here as a sort of glorified lightbox. The next image, playing with some pictures of London found online, uses tracing to explore iconicity and is a violent change-up of visual style.

Iconicity is interesting when we come to the Isle of Wight because its most iconic image is not a photographic one, but it's very outline. Next, we're going to have to talk about maps...and about the elephant in the room, the Isle of Wight itself.

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