Precendent

Michael Kenna

I very much enjoyed this photographers gallery, the style of these photos tie into the look I was trying for, although I hope to give my photos a more sinister slant.

The B&W effect is quite nice, I may completely convert my photos this way instead of just reducing the saturation. I am hoping it will help bump up the overall contrast.

Here are some of his photographs I liked the style of:

Noir recoloring...

On seconds thoughts I might have over darkened them... Here is one a little bit brighter, bringing out detail, but still dark enough to fit with the rest of the set.

Here are some B&W conversions done w.r.t. Michael Kenna's style.

Noir continued.

Had a nice overcast day so used this to get take some shots which I edited so to get a night-time effect (darkened and lowered saturation). Here is the best of this set.

Noir [take 1]

A washed out photo of a ghost ...

Proposal development

As I was completing the weekly assignment I began to appreciate the abstract nature of these photos, from that I thought back to the final shot of my second project: a shot designed to represent death. This photo was abstract and confrontational, in a way quite a depressing way to end the series.

It occurred to me that this style ties into the way horror films are presented; The strong contrast between light and darkness creates the suspense in early horror films, an effect that would not work if the scene was completely dark, or brightly lit. Therefore I hope to extend this effect to create a series that explores how light can create a sense of horror in otherwise normal environments.

Weekly Task

This week we used light to draw within the frame:

Here is a Piet Mondrain conversion of some 'light play' photos.

DSDN 144: Light Project

Proposal
For this project I want to explore how technology has penetrated almost all areas of life, and how this technology 'paints' us. To do this I am going to take minimal photographs where the sole source of light is the technology the person is using: for instance cellphones,ipods, computers and laptops.

At this point am I am not sure if the photographs will be close ups taken within a darkroom to create a sense of intimacy with an anonymous individual, or to photograph the technology using person from far away in a natural setting so that we get a glimpse of the surroundings, showing how absorbed the person is in the technology and oblivious to the natural beauty around him. Plus it would be odd to see someone sitting in a field using a laptop in the dark =)

Cellphone: Person looking away from camera cellphone to ear.
Ipod: Someone grooving with earbuds in + ipod in hand.
Laptop: Crosslegged on ground typing.
Not sure what fourth image should be at this point.

Terrace Fire
I happened to be scootering home soon after this fire was started so went over to victoria hill to get a city wide shot with the smoke, turns out some professional dude was their with a massive telefocal lens, the thing was as long as my arm, so took a photo of him taking a photo. Thought that had a kind of meta fit to the idea of this project.

Time Proposal continued.

With new inspiration, I began to think back to places and moments that had significance to me and which this significance might be relevant when photographed in the present.

As a child my family would often go on walks around the bays, during these walks one of the places we might stop at was the Massey Memorial around from Seatoun.

Taking these photos lead me toward my final concept: we all make monuments, be they monuments of great achievements or failures, monuments of guilt, regret or shame. Taking this metaphor further the pressure of time is like a monument we build around our necks; millstones that wear us down. These millstones are our jobs,work,school, family and friends, different priorities we must make time for. I had thought to make this concept into a short film with words, in poem form describing the metaphor. I actually originally intended to have the photos I submitted compiled into a video but ended up lacking the expertise to make it happen.

Life
The last and final concept was a result of merging the metaphor style of the monument idea with the feeling the photos of the snowstorm gave me. When the snow first started falling I was inside a tutorial with large windows and immediately had feeling of going through the wardrobe and entering Narnia, a world of magic. At the time, I was mainly taking photos in a journey format, trying to document it like I had in fact entered another world. During I also took some photos of other people enjoying the spectacle, something I found challenging as I have never taken photos of people before. I tended to shy away; losing the presence of the photographer as mentioned in lectures.

Originally I over looked these photos as i was focusing on the other proposals, dismissing them as cool photographs of a unique event. But after playing with the monument metaphor I had another look at all the photos I had taken for this project and the snow covered pathway jumped out at me as a metaphor also.

From here it was relatively simple to select the first 4 photos as representing ages 5-18, years that I recall as involving lots of looking forward, what will I be, and backward, how dumb was I then (just a few years ago). I also chose 4, rather than 1 or 2, to represent the frantic and fast paced nature of this time period. With this selection in hand the last snow photo signed the deal, and thankfully my shyness paid off, a medium distance of a family with a young child.

This 5 photo series nicely captured the period from 5 to 50 or so, but I needed a way to end the series: the harbor. The emergence of the harbor and the island within it showed the potentials the person had, so I thought why not use that as reference point, to show just how far the person has come. Eastbourne seemed like a good bet, it was across the harbor and also had a good ridge line to get height like the rest of the photos. It was during this photo shoot that the nature of the trees near the location gave me a great idea on how to show death without resorting to a cliche image of a gravestone: the gnarly and dying trees.

It was also at this point that I revised the purpose of the old age shot, because there was so much water, the land appeared so distant and the overall gloominess lead the viewer more to a feeling of regret, over all the things the person can no longer do (or fix).

 It took a couple tries to stop the camera auto-exposing on the tree rather than the sky for the death shot >_<

Time Proposal continued.

As mentioned in my previous post I had a number ideas which focused on the actual depiction of time rather than capturing the essence of time. For records sake I am going to type up what I had planned for these initial proposals before scrapping them and totally rethinking the project.

Sunday Market:
I liked the possibilities of this space as it represented a large distribution of movement within different time scales.
The slow depletion of the produce from the creates, the medium pace of the stores setting up and packing down and the frantic movement of individuals doing their shopping. Technically I had hoped to spend the entire day with a tripod and a good book taking medium length exposures, so as to slightly blur individuals, with a period of  between 1 and 5 minutes. This large set of images would then have been combined with video editing software.

Badminton:
The other idea was to take photos of either myself or the people in my club playing, attempting to get crisp, fast shutter, photos of the grace that is evident in sports and physical disciplines.

Both these ideas were scrapped due to my dislike of the literal interpretation of the brief.

Timeless God:
The next idea that I had, which actually involved my camera was the concept of religion, specifically those under the lose banner "Christianity". I wanted do contrast the timeless nature of God with the fickle nature of man; the differing representations that denominations have of curtain aspects. To do this I wanted to take shots from within churches. Each church would have the same number of photographs with the same compositions:

• Wide angle overview.
• Medium shot of alter.
• Choir (+ organ if church had them) looking back toward entrance.
• Close up of Pews, emphasis on parallel features.
• Close of up of banners/colored windows/roof carvings.

When I went out to take these photos I had the romantic notion that churches were open all the time, like they are in the movies... So the initial shots for this were all external ones.

At around this point I found the photographs of the amusement park destroyed by hurricane Katrina and once again felt compelled to scrap my concept...

As you can see these photographs were not very inspired, as at the time I was mostly pissed off at my inability to get inside the buildings!

Time Proposal

Pinning down a concept for this project turned out to be much harder than initially surmised. My first gut reaction to the brief were thoughts of awesome time lapse movies... In line with that I first decided to return to an area which was a potential 'space' for project 1, the Sunday markets. Unfortunately the first Sunday was rained out so I did not attempt anything and ended up having second thoughts on whether the idea was truly about 'time' or just a time lapse for its own sake. Similar problems occurred as I ended up coming up with concepts that were interesting if I could have pulled them off but not in my mind fully capturing the essence of time.

That when I came access this set of images: Six flags New Orleans. Haunting photos of an amusement park that was abandoned after hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005. With this new found muse I looked back through the photos I had taken, before having a good idea, and settled on the shots of the rare snowstorm in wellington.

The uniqueness of this event lends the photos a sense of standing part of time, conveniently enough during this photo session I steadily rose higher with each shot. This fact coupled with the inclusion of the path and the sense of time standing still I hope conveys the appearance of each shot moving though the lifetime of a person. From birth at the bottom of the hill, through till old age at the top, ending with the stark silhouette to signify death.

Contact sheets etc: Soon(tm).