Assignment 3 Tutor Report

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.