Overall Comments
It might be as well to have a look at the brief for the final assignment as you might find that the summer period supplies the greatest opportunities for its completion and forward planning is never wasted!
Feedback on assignment
This certainly has the look and feel of similar articles in many of the county magazines I have seen. This may be taken as a positive or negative criticism or (this is the correct choice) both. If you are looking to maximise your local commercial potential then there is a good argument that looking like all the others is the way to go, just remember the photo-journalists’ adage “f8 and be there”.
However, if an editor has submissions from two hopefuls, why would they choose yours? (I am not really speaking directly to your submission but in general) You need to have something that stands out, that is your signature that the editor will remember and commission signature that the editor will remember and commission you rather than anyone else.
So I would like to have seen you push the boundaries a bit. You should, perhaps, try to make it unique to Lyme Regis, to your particular town crier, and make it appeal to those from outside as well as those from Lyme itself.
Your images are well composed in general, correctly exposed and focused and so on so you have the basic skills, you have done the research on town criers in general and done a good interview with your chosen subject, what we need to see is your personal take on the whole thing. (I confess that I feel that a lot of editors on local magazines and so on aren’t interested in anything original but then I am just an old cynic!)
I really do feel that you should be shooting in raw. As you are using Lightroom, any adjustments that need to be made to large numbers of your images to adjust for your particular camera, for example to deal with slight de-saturation of the colour, adding capture sharpening, lens correction, etc etc. can be set up as a preset and applied to all at once as can exporting to your preferred j[eg settings or to a required setting for a particular client. But you still have all the original image to work with at another time and for another project. Why have a camera that shoots umpteen megapixels only to have half of them thrown away and why rely on someone else’s idea of how an image should look?
Just a couple of general thoughts. All lenses work at their optimum sharpness etc at about middle apertures; this usually means around f8. Digital lenses are particularly poor at the extremes and most consumer lenses really do loose sharpness when used at maximum aperture or at f16 and smaller. However, except with full frame sensors, depth of field is always large so it is difficult to use differential focus effects to isolate the main subject and at f8 depth of field is pretty enormous even when using a longish focal length. So either one has to accept this, in your images, at least the final ones, you have accepted this and included the background, crowds etc. as a major part of the subject, or compromise on sharpness and use the widest aperture available and as long a focal length as is feasible when differential focus is a needed technique.
Another thing is avoidance of noise in areas of even tone/colour and particular in low light levels. Not that noise is a problem in any of your images here. It is worth remembering that changing the ISO is just like turning the volume up on a radio, the music gets louder but so does any hiss and crackle. So the advice is to use the native ISO of the sensor (usually the lowest setting but not always) and only raise the ISO when it is impossible to do otherwise. What prompted me to mention this was seeing that you had used 400ISO for an outside shot where you could as easily used a wider aperture and a slower shutter speed with a lower ISO.
A final point is about the use of wide angle at close quarters. If you look at your shot Preparing you can see that the photos on the wall form a bit of an arc and the hands are rather out of proportion. Neither of these things are particularly distracting in this particular shot, but, be aware of this effect in future where it might spoil the shot. It’s all about training your eye.
I think that you should put thumbnails as contact sheets in your assessment submission. The learning log is perhaps the best place for them with comments on your choices. It will help to give the assessors the same sort of idea of the way you work and the sort of reasoning for your choices as your submissions to me do.
Learning Logs/Critical essays
Now you are back in harness as it were, I would like to see even more in your blog about books you are reading/consulting, magazine and/or internet sites you have visited and read, exhibitions (real and virtual) and so on in relation to your own work. Discussing things that are more or less connected to your photography practice is a vital part of a good learning log/blog.
Suggested reading/viewing
You will have quite enough reading to do in the preparation of your essay. If you are having trouble finding suitable articles to help e-mail me.
You may have already received links to these documents but in case here they are again:
Harvard referencing - http://oca-student.com/node/69870
Pointers for the next assignment
Most of the information you need on writing a Critical review is in the module document but if you have any questions just e-mail me. You can e-mail this assignment to me as a word document if you wish.
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
Friday, 5 July 2013
Assignment 3 completed
It's in the post to my tutor, fingers crossed it passes without too many criticisms.
On to Project 4
On to Project 4
Wednesday, 3 July 2013
Assignment 3
For
this assignment you will take photographs to support an editorial feature. The topic of the feature will be negotiated
between you and your tutor. The aim of
this commission is to provide you with a realistic framework for you to
experience working on a photographic assignment with tight deadlines, in-house
style requirements and with precise technical specifications for the production
and delivery of digital files. This
assignment should give you a feel of the pressure and the responsibility of
working on a topic chosen by someone else very much a real life scenario in
editorial environments
Your negotiation with your tutor should result in
a photographic brief, which will specify the following:
·
The
topic of the feature you will be working on
·
The
in-house style, both in terms of aesthetics and conceptual approach
·
The
technical specification of the digital files to submit
·
The
delivery method for the digital files
·
The
deadline for the completion of the work
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
brief
As my area of expertise when it comes to
photography, is portraiture I thought about whom I could approach to put
together a portfolio of pictures. I had
already used the mayor, local fossil hunter, collector, harbour master and
various other ‘characters’ from Lyme Regis.
I wanted someone who had an interesting life and was well known in the
town.
The
topic of the feature you will be working on
The Town Crier had recently resigned and
had been replaced by a new man and I thought this would give me a good
opportunity to approach him with the incentive of a portfolio of photographs
for him to use if he needed some publicity.
Alan Vian (pronounced Vee’an) agreed quite readily to allow me to work
with him as he carried out his duties around the town.
The
in-house style, both in terms of aesthetics and conceptual approach
My images needed to show the Town Crier
when he represented the Mayor and Town Clerk to the local and general public. I
had the idea to show him both organizing before an event and in his various
roles.
Technical
specification of the digital files to submit
I’ve worked in RAW and JPEG before and find
my camera (a Nikon D5200 DSLR) is not quick enough in downloading both types of
images to the memory card when I have used the multi-shot function and saving
images as both. This makes further pictures impossible to shoot until it has
finished and as it has a limited number of shots each time I press the shutter,
I have to extremely selective as to when I press the button. When I work in JPEG Fine it eliminates this
problem and I can shoot and be ready for the next shot almost immediately.
When submitting items for publication it’s
usual to submit images in either .eps or .pdf formats so that they can’t be
changed by anyone other than the author.
Delivery
method for the digital files
When working for local or national
publications, unless images are required for urgent publication and sent by
email which restricts their quality, pictures are supplied on CD or memory
stick with a contact sheet included to show what is on the disc. I will have previously assessed these images
for suitability and only the most relevant and correctly exposed should be
submitted.
Deadline
for the completion of the work
Deadline for this work was originally mid-April.
I was able to renegotiate a new deadline for submission as the series of
articles on local characters in Lyme was put on hold due to other publication
issues and the new deadline was extended to mid-July 2013.
Thinking about layout:
In ‘real life’ the final layout of your images is
something that you would not necessarily have any control over. Drawing on the knowledge that you gained from
the exercises leading to the assignment take images, take images that fall
within the following groups:
· Opening images – take both vertical images
that can be used on the cover and horizontal images that can be printed as a
double spread at the beginning of the article
· Main body of images – these provide the
core of the visual storytelling
· Closing images - provide a visual ending
and propose a resolution to the main storyline.
Thinking in terms of layout when working on
assignment ensure that the photo editor will have all the necessary visual
components to illustrate the feature
Having
worked with the local paper on other local character photo shoots, I had a
reasonable idea of what type of pictures they would require. I discussed the type of work that a Town
Crier does with the Lyme town crier, Alan, and thought through what would make
the best, strongest images of him. I
recorded an interview with him to get some background information to enable me
to show his strengths.
I
decided to use an A3 layout in landscape which would be 16.56” x 11.7” or 42 x
29.7 cms. I laid out non-printing guide
lines to give me consistency throughout the pages. This gave me a one-inch white border around
the edges and a gutter of 2 inches in the middle.
When it came to the image on the first
page, I decided against the picture above as I felt that it left Alan out of
the main area and he wasn’t the first person you focused on. The image I finally used had him directly on
a third. Then I blurred the remainder of
the image and sharpened him to bring him into greater prominence.
Pages
1/2 Layout
Above you can see how the Town Crier was
leading the parade and was dominant in the picture. I sharpened his figure after I used the Quick
Mask to select him. Then I used
Select/Inverse to select the rest of the image and used the Blur filter to a
radius of 3.5 pixels to push the rest of the parade into the background.
I recently acquired a book called “Pictures
on a Page” which was first printed in 1978 but is still highly relevant
today. See my blog – Exhibitions and
Reviews at http://ocapdpreviewsjenhollands.blogspot.co.uk/
for my review on this book. It has
various sections including how to crop pictures so that the significant area is
the main focus. It has made me look at
my pictures again and I cropped this first image with those thoughts in mind.
I planned to show how Alan worked for the
good of the town in the middle section of the article when he mingled with the
local and general public. The Town Crier
is often asked to ‘open’ events or just be a presence at an event to give it suitable
gravitas and whilst there weren’t many events at Easter, there should be
sufficient to fulfill this mid section of the article. After my discussion with Alan, when he
explained the significance of the regalia, I could make a point of
photographing the various items of livery which were significant to the role, i.e.,
the silver badge of office and the tricorne hat with a feather.
Pages 3/4 Layout
These images give an insight into how Alan transforms
himself into town crier mode and also includes a simple explanation about the
history of the livery.
Pages 5/6 Layout
In the closing section I felt I could use more of my images with him mingling with the general public as much of his duties are based around being seen and ‘heard’.
Alan is a great ambassador for the town and
it was a privilege to be able to work with him so freely.
Choose fonts carefully
Choose
the fonts carefully and explain, in your learning log, the reasons for each
choice of font
Over the years I have worked on various
in-house publications and attended training courses in the layout of
newsletters and pamphlets. The general
rules were to have a strong sans-serif headline/sub-heading to make them stand
out and use a serif font for the main body text as this enabled the reader’s
eye to read along the lines more easily.
Depending upon whether you use an Apple Mac
or a PC seems to denote which fonts a designer tends to favour. A designer using a PC will tend to use Arial as the sans-serif heading font and Times
New Roman for the serif body text. A designer who works on Apple Mac would tend
to use the Helvetica
sans-serif font for headings and Georgia
serif font for body text.
As I use an Apple iMac I’ve used Helvetica
for headings and Georgia for body
text. It’s important to KIS (keep it
simple) and not to use too many different fonts or styles in a publication as
this causes confusion to the reader and they might well cease reading what
could be an important article or message.
Captioning:
For this assignment you are asked to write
captions for your images and ensure that all the information about the images
should be embedded in the metadata. As a
bare minimum you should aim to fill in the creator, headline and description
fields of the IPTC metadata.
25
June: At
this point I don’t have Lightroom 5 but have downloaded a trial copy. This needs the updated version OS Mountain
Lion so I have to buy that first and install it before I can continue.
30
June: I
have now downloaded the latest version Mac operating system and can now use the
trial software of Lightroom 5.
Unfortunately there are no YouTube videos available yet to work through
how to use it so I have to watch videos on version 4.
Writing
Captions
I’ve tried to keep to the 5 W’s when
writing captions for the images I’ve used and find it helps immensely. They are as below:
Who - If there is a person and he or she is
prominent
What - Usually the alternative to who, but
also can be what the person is doing - a simple, accurate description
Where - What’s the location and what
details about the location are important for the viewer to know?
When - Is time important for the image, the
actual date, season? It may not be, but
if it’s part of the story, write it in.
Why - Is there a reason behind the event
unfolding or the subject being there?
This ‘W’ is the one that is usually least obvious from just looking at
the image.
There are two other areas to consider and
they are:
Don’t overload with detail - There’s a
finite limit to what most viewers want to absorb about an image. It is a photograph first and foremost, and
doesn’t need to be over-burdened with words.
Don’t spell out what’s obvious - The issue
here is redundance, keep to the point and use words succinctly.
Conclusion:
I enjoyed working with Alan when I was
building my portfolio as he was a most generous man and gave of his time
freely. He is always extremely busy but
made himself available to give me the background to his role as town crier and
still greets me when I meet him at various functions.
This has been a stimulating assignment both
photographically and design wise, as I’ve had to move into areas that I haven’t
used before. I’ve always kept away from
Adobe Lightroom in the past as I felt that I didn’t need such a high-tech, professional
programme to manipulate my images but, having been to a demonstration recently
with the RPS South Western DIG group, I can see how it could enable a
photographer to manipulate large numbers of images quickly.
I have also had to explore more areas in
Photoshop but am not sure that I will continue to convert my images to smart
objects as this seems to limit the amount of filters, etc, that can you
used.
Each of these level 2 assignments have
taken me out of my comfort zone and made me explore new areas which can only be
a good thing. I think we get too
complacent and stick with what we know and fail to see potential in something
new.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)