Choosing our main three ideas.

Most of today's time was spent finishing all the work that needed to be done for our sketch books and making sure all loose ends were tied up, and every bit of work was up to date. So i completed my research report, printed it out, and put it in my sketch book. Put my test shots in and annotated them. Annotated the pictures we took the other week with the film cameras.

When i finished all this work i focused on choosing my main three ideas which i would use for my project. I decided on Fear, Magic, and Ghosts. I chose these three because i think i can make something really good out of them and i think they go well together. Well it does depend on how the person would perceive these three things and how they would explain, and annotate them.

Here's an example of a picture which describes fear.

I actually find this picture quite scary and disturbing myself. A lot of people are scared of going down stairs into a dark basement scared of some mysterious monster. That's why this picture works so well because things like this play on people's minds and it describes fear quite well. I wouldn't exactly be using fear in this particular way in my project but i think this picture definitely has an element of fear to it.

Here is a picture which describes magic

Although this picture does not describe magic in the best way. I wasn't actually thinking of magic in a way like fairies and happy magic. I was thinking of the More dark and sinister side of magic. This picture isn't particularly dark and sinister but tarot cards can be quite sinister and evil. I have quite a few good ideas of what I'm going to do for my project and how I'm going to define magic with the pictures i take.

Here is a picture which describes ghosts.

This picture is actually meant to be a picture of a real ghost, whether it is or not i don't know. But the white see through ghostly figure is quite convincing. i think the photo is taken very well as well on the stairs, quite a dark photo with a bright light white figure standing in the middle.

I would portray ghosts quite differently in my project, not so much like this picture. But still use the same idea of a dark photo with a white ghostly figure in it.

I'm going to mix all these ideas together to make one big idea, and take pictures which have all these things in them.

Hi Arianne

Nice blogging and good to have included some pictures - why did you not feel that they were successful? Try to comment upon what worked and what didn`t and why..

Week 2

We finished off our research reports this morning and also wrote our dark room diaries, which is basically annotating the pictures in our sketch books and explaining how I took the pictures, what it involved, how I think they turned out and what I could do better next time to make sure they turn out better. Also including reasons of why each picture was taken and what I was thinking at the time. After Lunch we got told what the brief was and exactly what we had to produce during this unit.

The brief is to produce a piece of work which includes dark room photography, it should also be 3D installation art, and not much restrictions of size of the object either or the amount of the photos put on it. Also it needs to interpret the word 'Believe' or something that you as an individual are inspired in. It should also be 'thought provoking' for others and it doesn't have to necessarily be understood by others.

A few ideas that i thought of included: Magic, fear, fear of the unknown, illusions, fantasy, what people believe in, what you as an individual consider to be magic, and whether you consider it to be truth or lies, deception, disguise, dreams, ghosts, delusion, premonitions etc.

The main ideas I'm going to be focusing on however are Magic, Fear of the unknown, what people believe in and what they consider to be magic, how magic is disguised and if it is deceiving.

I also went out onto Parkus piece to take a few pictures which would sort of fall into the category of these ideas, however Parkus piece is not the best place to be taking pictures like this and was not very successful. Here are a few of the pictures.

First day of Artefact unit

Today was the first day of the artifact unit, second week of cram. However last week all of us we're based at coleridge to finish off everything we were doing in the previous unit and talked to Mr.Durran and Mr.hind about our progress and how well we were doing and what our targets should be for the next unit. We all also began our research report for the unit we were in.
We had a very eventful day today and i learned so much for one day. First off we got into pairs and went out to take pictures. we got given a camera to share between a pair and had to finish most of a film off. It was quite difficult at first as we had to make sure everything was perfect, like the shutter speed, the focus, and just whether the light was green or not. to make sure the pictures came out decent enough to use.
After break we returned to the photography room with all our pictures taken. This part was one of the most difficult parts. We had to remove the film from the camera and take it out of its case and put it onto the reel perfectly inside a black light proof bag, without being able to see. As this was my first time ever doing something like this i found it quite challenging at first, but Zaigham and i took it in turns to do and we managed it fine in the end. After we put the film on the reel we had to put it in a light proof cup with its lid on, which was like a funnel, still all inside the bag not being able to see. Once the cup was closed and away from any light, we put the developer in for several minutes for the film to develop, and then quickly rinsing with water afterwards to finally put the fix on for another 4-5 minutes. After this was finished we dried our films. This part of the day was quite difficult and was really complicated at first, as we had to learn so many new things at once and were just bundled with a bunch of information but it was actually a lot easier than i expected it to be and actually quite fun.
After lunch we developed our pictures in the dark room, which was by now the hardest part. The first few times i printed the pictures they didn't turn out right, or went black because they were overexposed, however after doing it a few times it became a lot simpler and sort of just came naturally. I didn't need to time how long the pictures were in each solution after a while either, i knew when they were ready and needed to go in the next one. by the end of the day i had printed out several pictures, however most of them were actually of me, as the ones i took were slightly out of focus but i still learned how to print out and develop the pictures which i thought was the most important part of this day. Next time we do something like this I'll be much more efficient at doing it and know what I'm doing and wont need as much assistance.