Hat Season

Just a little digital preview of a photo I took today for my series and sequence project. I shot it in both black and white and color, so we'll see how it turns out.

And these other two, I was just messing around. I figured if I had lighting set up why not have some fun. I've also somehow managed to make digital look like film! And I'm not even sure how.

I was talking to a good friend the other night about my project. He liked my sequence of oranges but said it was too predictable and I needed to think about the consequences of making photographs that look like paintings and what does it mean putting that out there. He's very good at working with concept and historical and cultural relevance. I knew these were things I needed to think about and know but he also thought my work should reflect those things. For example, that painting is an original art form and I am now mimicking with one of the most evolving technologies. He suggested taking the photos with a cell phone camera to make a statement about that. I told him that wasn't what my project was about and that making those images wouldn't be satisfying to me no matter how "smart" they may be. When he finally understood that I really just wanted my photos to be about the shape, form and lighting and making an image just to be beautiful he suggested that I needed to make my critique a performance piece and pretend to show them images, again on the cell phone, as if they were my real project to get my point across that I just wanted to make images about beauty and not concept. And I just thought to myself why does it all need to be a big performance or a huge statement? Because I know if I did something like that and did it intelligently I feel like most university art teachers would love it. But I know if and when I show most of my photos they sneer and go it looks like an advertisement. Why can't my concept be that I wanted to create images simply for aesthetic pleasure? And if it can be why do I have to shove it in their faces by making it a conceptual performance piece? I am sure there will be several pages of research on this in my sketchbook soon. Any thoughts, feelings, musings or other things on this topic would be interesting to hear.

Apples and Oranges

and pears and mushrooms. Here are the next set of still life images. I have also started working with sequence and not just series. As seen here with the oranges:

I also had a sequence of an apple being eaten, however it got light leaked because the top to my developing tank was not on all the way. I also did some pomegranates but they scanned a bit wacky, as with most of these images. The prints looks really great though, just how I want them to look. I had a tutorial yesterday with a teacher and he seemed to think they were almost too simple and I somehow needed to complicate them. Like using other objects or something more. I'm not quite sure how to go about this or even if it's really what I want to achieve with these. I do think it's worth trying though since fruit is never busy like a model might be.

There is something I find so wonderful about just a single piece of fruit or vegetable sitting on a completely plain backdrop. Although most of these foods are loaded with symbolism and the original still life paintings were also full of other meanings, I have absolutely no intentions of purposely conveying any sort of symbol or meaning. I know that everyone brings their own outside influences when they look at an image but for these I want you to simply look at them and see the wonderful curve of the pear with the stem jutting out. I want you to see the simple subtle soft yellow color. I want you to look at all the individual separations of the inside of the mushroom and its almost perfect symmetry. I want you to look at the negative space created and rippling texture of the backdrop and to think about the lighting. I simply want to create an image that is nice to look at.

I guess it's these thoughts that make it hard for me to decipher the line between wanting to be a fine art photographer and a commercial photographer. And I think that's why I have found my time here at GSA a challenge. A challenge I choose to accept but possibly never overcome.

New Term, New Project.

I am now a week into the winter term here at the Glasgow School of Art and getting into my new project. We were given a brief telling us to do things about series, sequence and narrative. I think I am going to make three different, yet related, bodies of work for each category. I am beginning with the series aspect. For this I am basing it off of the old still life paintings of food. I've always enjoyed these food paintings. I like the clean quality of lighting, the vibrant colors and the presentation of food. These three paintings are loosely what I am looking at for inspiration. Lots of these paintings are loaded with meaning and every object represents something. I am interested in this and having been reading a lot about it, however I do not wish to bring that aspect into my photographs. For me they are going to be more about line, shape, form and color.

Floris Claesz van Dijck:

Francisco de Goya:

This has to be one of my favorites. By a man named Juan Sanchez Cotan. I really like the use of the string and hanging things.

This project for me is also going to be about lighting and how to achieve certain styles. These are just some very rough shots of what I am thinking about. Once again these are VERY rough, so please excuse the wrinkly paper, not very good lighting and awkward color balancing. I had set up some lighting so my friend Gemma could photograph some ceramic pieces she had made and I decided while I had everything set up I could just use a few things I had to experiment a bit with the Yashica and lighting since I had never attached it to a strobe. This is very basic softbox lighting. I enjoy these images for their simplicity. It has made me think that maybe instead of elaborate set ups I will try a more simple approach. I will be shooting in film and printing in the darkroom.

I am also hoping to delve much deeper into the research aspect of this project than I did last term. I'm still a bit unsure how it may exactly help my photography though. I feel it will help me understand more about the history of the genre and the significance of certain objects and food but I am not sure if that will really effect the images that I wish to make. But I will forge through the deeper meanings and images laden with context for the sake of learning and for my own personal good to broaden my horizons.

A Very British Holiday in Film

Here are the photos I took over my holiday on film. I used my little Yashica TLR which I find very fun to shoot with, however occasionally a bit difficult. I think it's mostly that when you look in the view finder everything is reversed so it makes it kind of difficult to frame a picture sometimes. These are pretty much all nature shots from the Lake District, because really there isn't much else there to photograph. However I found it fun to use the camera for things that are almost like snapshots.

These two are some of my favorites. They have a feeling to them that I don't think I could ever quite achieve with digital.

I had a third one of these hat photos however it came out very blurry. I find them kind of fun. I think one day I will look back at all my vacation photos and have a lot of hats, toys, and various other things sitting in settings from around the world, as I've been doing things like this since a young age. Most of the photos from a trip to Paris when I was fourteen contain a small jar of jam that I would get at breakfast every morning.

I used nearly a whole roll of film to get this one picture of the sheep. They were very afraid of me.

A Very British Holiday

Instead of going home for the holidays my parents came here, which was very nice. We spent Christmas in Edinburgh then moved on to the Lake District in England and finally ended up back in Glasgow for a few days. I didn't take that many pictures but I find it less and less interesting to take tons vacation snapshots and often find I never know what to do with them afterwards. However I do feel it is good to always carry my camera around, just in case. These first two are from the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh which had a really nice painting portrait show.

This ranks as the world's number two coolest bathroom. The first one is in Cuzco, Peru and I unfortunately have no photos of it.

This is the lake district. It was really beautiful and covered in snow. I had also brought my film camera and took a quite a few pictures with it there. I still have to develop them but expect to see them soon.

And finally the Necropolis in Glasgow.

School starts back up for me on Tuesday. I am both excited and dreading it (because who doesn't like vacation?) I'm hoping to improve from my grade last term now that I have a better understanding of what kind of things I should really be thinking about more. Also my dad brought my strobe and soft box over for me so I am hoping to work on some lighting and experiment a bit with that.

A Belated Merry Christmas

Since I was about thirteen my dad has asked me to give him a self portrait for Christmas. They evolved each year from drawing to collages and finally for the past maybe five years they have been photographs. Here's this years final:

Plus a few out takes:

Tomato

Boredom has hit after only two days of break. So I went and bought a cheap black sheet to use as a backdrop. I might get a grey one too. I kind of like this tomato one. I only wish the tomato has exploded down my face and not in my mouth. I've been thinking of photographing food and people for a bit now but never really got around to do anything with it, not being exactly sure as what to do.

Yashica

For my birthday this past weekend my parents got me my first medium format camera. After several emails arguing with my dad about which one would be best I finally convinced him I didn't want a rangefinder or any other format besides 6x6 and got a Yashica TLR camera. I am very happy with it but haven't had much of a chance to use it. I've just shot one roll and these are two images from it that I liked.

In other news I had my final crit today. I really liked the way we did it, where you did not critique your own work you were in another room critiquing another groups and the artist had no say at all. It was nice to feel a bit more free to say what you want since you won't personally offend a person and I also enjoyed not having to explain my own work since it is something I am not good at. However until today I had no real sense of how and what they were assessing us on. And considering how harsh and intense my group of was the work we were critiquing I was quite worried about it. They seemed very focused on having lots and lots of research and tons of scrapbooks and journals full of everything and I personally had three pages of scribbled notes in my journal, assuming it was not as important as the actual product, never having been really taught to research for my photo projects. But someone who had maybe four or five notebooks of research and contact sheets but only one image repeated in different color balances hung on the wall got a really good mark from my group and I just didn't quite understand it. At the end of the crit we received a sheet with what the group had marked us (not our actual grade) and a few comments. I didn't do very well in the research sections but did well in practical skills and awareness of own practice. Overall I got on the scale from excellent (A) to very poor (G) I got a a high C or top of the good scale. Which I am pleased with and glad I now know what I need to work more on next term and am excited but also very afraid of coming up with a new project.

Brush Your Teeth

This is Reuben brushing his teeth. This is also the last of the series for now. Tuesday I have my final crit for this. I am going to choose one Holga image and one regular image from each set to hang up. Our crit is very different from any crit I've had. We are divided into two groups and one group hangs their work in one room and the other in another. We will then switch rooms and critique work we know nothing about without the artist giving us any information. I like this but I really wish I could hear the feedback that I would be getting, since that usually is the point of the crit. Then in the next week I believe we get an individual assessment from the teachers. It's all a bit unclear.

As for these images, I like them. I think the way he dressed took this from someone who could be possibly camping and brushing his teeth into more of a bizarre scenario.

I'm glad I am done with these. They caused me much more stress than I would have liked them too. I am still not sure if I am entirely happy with them though. However I do feel they made progress from the ones I did last semester at UArts.

Blow Drying

Becca blow drying her hair, by the river. I quite like the ones where she isn't actually blow drying her hair. I feel like these and the ironing ones work most on the bizarre element because of the obvious lack of electricity. I just keep thinking they are too simple almost, but I am almost afraid to take them to the surreal, wondering if it would just be way too much. And if simplicity is the best in making you think about the image, because if it was completely surreal people might easily disregard it was just too fantastical. I keep getting suggestions about juxtaposition and posing and how the body relates to the objects. I don't quite know what to do with these suggestions, especially the body relating to the objects. Because how else would the body relate to them? I want the objects to be used in the proper way. Once I am there shooting with the model I tell them to just do what they might normally do with the scenario and I move around them, giving some direction like look past me or stand over there. I get so into what I am seeing through the lens and framing the image interestingly instead of how they might be reacting to me as much. However I think these images turned out nicely, I enjoy the colors and setting a lot. I almost worry that all of these are starting to look a bit like a bunch of catalog images instead of "fine art" (whatever that is). I have received a few comments that they look like advertisements. Here that seems to be the kiss of death, however I do enjoy that my photos maybe have that very finished look it's something I definitely try to achieve. These images (all of the chore images) almost feel not grand enough.

I only have three weeks left in the term and I hope to come to some kind of resolve with these because I think this might be the end of this project for a bit. I shot one more person today which might be my last for the project (also because the weather is so horrible here that it's hard to get a dry day to shoot). Maybe if I come back to it after a while I will have more enthusiasm for it and more knowledge of...something, that might help it. For now I am mildly pleased with these but look forward to next term and trying shooting some new things. And if you managed to read all of this post I truly appreciate it. I use this blog a lot to just think out loud and in hopes of other being able to see my images and give me feedback.