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Light Project - Final Images, Winter Landscape

 The narrative behind this series is a journey up a snowy mountain, beginning from a high aerial shot down to the tire tracks in the snow (I thought this was a nice ending as it really enforced the idea of a journey). I think it was important to leave the images as black and white as it maintained that rich contrast that my photos had at the beginning of my explorations. The exposure was adjusted depending on how light or dark I wanted parts of the image to be. Shadows were cast in the first images to give a sense of clouds above but in the rest of the images the shadows are merely cast by the flour itself. Some of the images were altered slightly and some were flipped, based on the technique of Alfred Steiglitz, in order to give a different appearance of space. In the 4th image a surface of jelly was used to give a slight reflective quality like ice. 

Overall I am quite happy with how this series turned out, my favourite image is the second in the series, that to me truly looks like a mountain landscape and I am happy with the way the camera was positioned as though you were looking up at the mountain. I also love the third in the series which is another image which appears to be a realistic representation of a glazier due to its colouring.

In terms of my idea, I was a bit concerned as i thought it went off on a different tangent to what I originally explored, but it was through my development, and my explorations of light and shadow that led to me to creating these images, as well as through reading about the Equivalence series. I believe that I have learnt a lot about my camera through this project and how light can truly effect an image. I also found out how to adjust the exposure, and what that can do to enhance or take away from an image. A highly exposed image seemed relevant through my initial stages in the project but i see that it is something which needs to be adjusted constantly in order to get the best out of your scene. I also learned how to manual focus which I was really happy about as it is something I was always unsure of how to do and is a useful skill as auto focus sometimes just does not want to focus on the right thing. 

Final Photoshoot

I believe that this photoshoot really shows my development process as my idea dramatically changes as I went through it. I planned on using my original objects (the two ergonomic men) to cast shadows on objects of different shapes and textures. As I had already looked at reasonably flat objects the first one I looked at was a pile of flour. This was due to its possibility to be moulded and shaped and also the variety of textures it has. Originally I was placing my ergonomic men on the flour, in front of the light and inside the flour in an attempt to cast an interesting shadow, this I found to be difficult however, due to the quality of the flour. As a surface it had so much texture which was already casting shadows onto itself making the shadows casting a lot more difficult as I could not get a strong enough shadow. It came down to me discarding the ergonomic men and casting shadows with hands in order to get a stronger more controlled shadow. Looking through my camera during the photoshoot I then found this particular image:

This brought me back to the image I had earlier which had a shadow cast that looked like a mountain landscape. The image above to me looked like an aerial shot of a snowy mountain and a landscape. By using light and shadow a sense of scale is lost. It also made me think about Alfred Steiglitz and his Equivalent series. As there was no context in those images they appeared abstract. The same applies here as there is a lack of context which would usually give scale, therefore that sense of reality or nature is lost. This completely adjusted my idea to focus on the flour and how I could use light to change how it is perceived. 

Equivalents (Clouds) by Alfred Steiglitz

Equivalents by Alfred Steiglitz

This is an interesting series, both to look at and also to read about. Alfred wanted to take photographs of something which proved his good photography was not due to the content of his photos. This was a series which was added too over many years between 1925-1936, and was actually very complex to shoot as it required filters which allowed the clouds to be seen in the sky. I can imagine this would be similar to the digital camera, where the exposure is changed to allow brighter or darker objects to be seen more clearly, much like me with my shadows. This series was also classified as the first abstract series. It is such a simple thing to photograph but clouds are very diverse and with no context could appear as anything. Some images such as the one directly above contains a small snippet of a tree giving some context but the rest simply appear as textures or shapes with light and shadow, I find that the top one could even be mistaken for water or a waterfall. It was described as a void of any reference points, there is nothing in the images to indicate what they are. 

Another interesting technique I picked up while reading about this series was the use of image flipping. As the images were abstract Steiglitz did not care for the orientation based on how he photographed them, I believe he possibly looked more at the composition. Sarah Greenough said that by doing this he was "destabilising your relationship with nature in order to have you think less about nature, not to deny that it's a photograph of a cloud but to think more about the feeling that the cloud formation evokes." This is a very interesting point and has something I have done for my communications paper in my architecture coarse. If you flip the image it alters the sense of reality and it is read completely differently and sometimes looks a lot better or appropriate.   

Idea exploration, idea change

In this photo below, with the help of my tutor, I have noticed that the shadow cast is very distorted due to the nature of the surface. In this particular photo I see that the shadow cast looks like a landscape due to the way it falls. 

To continue my explorations I want to try to photograph shadows on different surfaces and see how that effects the overall image. This image below is the same. The way the shadow has been cast on something at a 90 degree angle also distorts the it.