Catch-up Time!

Hoorah! Another blog on the same night! What luck!

I have been at school for a little while, so let's just get us up to speed with where we are at right now!The course is dedicated to purely photography, and so all of the briefs are photography related.

We started fairly easily, with a basic analysis exercise of a photo that we really adore. I had no choice in the matter really, I had an image in mind that I have adored since I first set eyes on it. The photographer is the magnificent Mr Thom Kerr, with an image from a series he did for Black Magazine.

I wrote about the pure amount of amazing that is in this image, from the contrast through to the composition everything is absolutely perfect (except for the flower stem in the lower right hand side of the image which I found distracting). Things could only go up from here! I was super excited about the course and was looking forward to the next brief, which was ...

Shutter Speed! Mastering the basics was going to be the focus of the next few assignments, and so we set out to do a bunch of research into the kind of effects we can make with different shutter speeds! Having substantial knowledge of basic photography already, I wanted to push things a little more :) I decided to try panning, but soon realised that without a tripod, it is fairly difficult - my best attempt can be seen below. The other idea I had was to capture the motion of a small flame on a tea-light candle, which actually worked pretty well! Although at the start I thought that these basic projects would be quite boring, it was really helpful to ensure that I knew why things were changing, and not just that they were changing.

We then moved on to the next most important aspect of basics: Aperture! I already use a fair amount of aperture control in my photography pre-course, so found this assignment really straightforward to just complete very quickly and easily - not taking for granted that this was likely the last time I would have this luxury! This was one of my final images to show a wide aperture:

As well as these two, we had another little brief on the side (they keep coming and coming!) - street photography. We could interpret this is a bunch of different ways, and so I chose to focus on an element of city life, namely religion and religious buildings. Religion is a huge interest of mine, being a hugely spiritual person, but in a highly unconventional way - I am a Wiccan, a witch, with strong ties to nature and energy. To some this may all sound rather silly, but I believe faith is like a diamond - in essence faith brings people the same thing, but to look at faith as a whole there are many different paths, just as there are many different faces of a diamond. In any case, I think faith is a hugely personal thing, and can't imaging a worse thing than judging someone or being judged because of the faith you follow. Anywho, I wanted to take a different approach to what would have been the easy way (dedicating the project to Christian iconography) and cover Christianity and Buddhism in a very similar way to prove the whole diamond point I made before. Living in post earthquake Christchurch, it was fairly challenging to find a church that we could get inside, but eventually we got there with a quaint little church out in the suburb that my school is in :) I had so much fun on this project and got some photographs that I am super proud of:

And then, everything got kicked into overdrive when we started working with FILM! Real film! We have six (you heard right, six!) briefs on the go at the moment:

• Group Portraiture
• Photos of our classmates, one roll of film
• ISO
• Photos working on a theme, two rolls of film at different speeds (125/400)
• Line, Tone, Texture and Lightfall
• One roll of film
• Photograms
• No film! Hoorah! Darkroom based
• Dodging and Burning
• Darkroom based
• Variable Contrast Filters
• Darkroom based

The film has all been taken, and developed (all by myself!) and we have just started at a local High School to print everything up! That's where we are at now - I can't wait to show you what the result of some long days in the darkroom are!!

Unicorn nuzzles,

Artifex