Jigsaw

Recently I purchased some new equipment, a small table top product table as I realised I would need it for the majority of my products this term so saw it as an investment. Along with this I bought two table top lights so that I could keep my photographs consistent especially when it came to the hands and still life.

I went home and got my Mum to make a jigsaw up of a scene, only a small 500 piece one to see how it would turn out and look.







The photographs did not really turn out how I wanted them too, as I did not like the hands in the photographs, the composition was wrong, and it is not constant enough. I think having no outcome yet for this, I do not really know where this project is going, so I am going to have a think about it.

Time Over A Day

The contents of my projects keep changing, especially time over day and time over months. I have decided for my time over a day to do some sort of activity. I decided to do a jigsaw and each piece being added I take a photograph of from the same angle, height etc. By the end you will have seen the Jigsaw start off from one piece to it being completed.

I have not decided how I will present this project at the end yet, as this will take some thought.

Tester Photographs

I went into my old college to try and get a wide range of ages to come and have their photographs taken. I have recently found out that I however cannot go into nurseries and old folks homes as I have to have a CRB check. This has ut a bit of a stop to me trying to get 1-100 as the two end of the spectrums are the hardest parts.

However I will cross that bridge when I come to it. The photo shoot went well in respect to the amount of people that turned up, but my equipment as no where near up to scratch as I had to russell something up with a table, flat board screwed to it as a background and white card. The photographs did not turn out very well, but they gave me some idea of how good the compositions worked.






As you can see there are very heavy shadows, there is a line where the card is joining and over all the presentation is not good at all. It was good to see when I said to them hold you hands the way you would do when you are relaxed the different types of positions that they held, and it was different with age. The young ones were very creative where as the older subjects had a very traditional way of presenting.

I will obviously reshoot with some better lighting and equipment but this was not a wasted shoot.

College

I have got a two day photo shoot next week in a college to start my hand project. I thought a college is a good place to start and is accessible to me, as they have a huge range of ages from 16+. This is going to be a tester shoot and I want to experiment with compositions which I have researched and also compositions which come naturally to the people that I am photographing.

General Compositions

I have been looking at some ideas for general compositions for my hand photography. I have decided that I do not want them to be very complicated at all and just simple compositions will work a lot better. I am also changing my mind about putting them into a photo-book as I feel it could be quite interesting putting up prints on a wall and not in any particular order so the hands are all mixed up in different ages.

Here are just some compositions I found:








These examples have also come in handy for looking at the types of lighting and also backgrounds I could potentially have.
I like the idea of having a plain back ground so that my photographs are very much consistent throughout so that when they are put in a grid they are very similar and this does not distract the viewer from the subject.

Website: http://www.betterphoto.com/gallery/dynoGall2.asp?catID=352&pageID=1&rows=12&contestCatID=&camID=

Rineke Dijkstra

- Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, the Netherlands, in 1959
- Studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1986
- A self-portrait produced during her rehabilitation, in which she is seen having just emerged from a pool, exhausted, sparked a new direction in her work
- These formed her breakthrough Beaches series (1992–96), which featured her young subjects in different locations in the United States and Europe
- She also commenced a series of images of Almerisa, an adolescent Bosnian refugee, whom she continued to photograph until 2003
- She has also focused on particular individuals entering the military, as in her images of Olivier Silva, a French Foreign Legionnaire (2000–01), and new inductees into the Israeli army (2002–03)





http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/01/14/what-s-in-a-portrait-rineke-dijkstra-s-almerisa

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/bio/?artist_name=Rineke%20Dijkstra&page=1&f=Name&cr=4

- Renike is influential to my work as she has created sets of images over a period of time. The series of images go on a journey with the subject or several subjects to show how their life changes throughout the time she spend capturing them.

David Moore

David Moore is a British photographer and he once did a similar project in 1996 what i am doing with being interested in hands. He did a project which was based on the subject holding something in their hand which represented them personally, their occupation, hobbies etc. Here are some examples I found:








http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/art/artist/davidmoore/

I found these photographs very interesting as you get to know a bit about the person just from one object in the palm of the hand which is very interesting. This has also given me some ideas for my compositions and lighting. I do not think i want it to be lit quite as dark as there photographs but the composition is interesting.

Portraits

For the time over years I originally decided that I would like to do portraits but I thought that this potentially could be too obvious and I never like my photography to be necessarily easy to guess what it is about. I thought of another way I could communicate the theme of aging over years would to take photographs of their hands.

I thought that this area of my project would be good to fit in with the photo-book outcome and getting ages from 1-100 by going to some nurseries, colleges, work places and also old folks homes.

I am going to start researching photographers that have already done projects on the theme of time and see what type of takes they have had on it.

Ideas

Now I have my theme I have been looking at 4 main ways of conveying this theme.
I have decided to do:

Time over years : I am thinking of doing just simple portraits of age ranges from 1-100 to show how people change over years and in a sense deteriorate.

Time over months: For this I was thinking of looking at seasons and taking a photograph of a tree through autumn to show how the tree loses its leaves and also the colour changing


Time over weeks: My idea for this one is to do some sort of still life piece, and to have a bowl of different fruits and watch how the rot and deteriorate over 2/3 weeks, the colours, textures etc

Time over a day: This idea I thought about maybe doing a day in the life of a person, so following them when they go to work, being at work, what they do in the evenings etc. I also thought about taking a photograph every 15 minutes at a bus stop to show the different people that go through everyday and the amount of shopping they have, children, ages etc

Now I have narrowed my idea down I can start researching different photographers and also start taking some photographs to see how they are turning out. There is of course room for change if I feel the need for it as these are not set projects.

Theme

I have decided to go with a running theme throughout my projects rather than do four separate ones. One main idea that has occured is going along with the theme of Time. I find this theme quite fascinating as it is something that happens everyday, something that you don't actually really think about but there are also different forms of it.

These forms are such things as clocks, years, days, weeks, hours, minutes seconds, degeneration, decomposition, childhood, adulthood, teenage years etc. All of these have many photography opportunities but it is making sure I pick the right four for my project.

To pick which ones I want to do I am going to think about which ones would be more interesting and also maybe look at some that are obvious but also some that when you look at the photographs they could also mean other aspects as well.
With this in mind I am going to look over the aspects and go away and have a think.

However

I definitely know that this is going to be my theme!

Theme

I am just starting my third and final year if university and I have decided to take Photography. We have been asked to come up with four projects which in the end have four separate outcomes.

These outcomes are:
Exhibition
Portfolio
Screen Based
Photo Book

The four projects do not have to be directly linked but they can if we wish have a running theme throughout them. we also need to raise £2000 for an external exhibition which can be shown anyway which we as group would like to. The options can be internal exhibition, publication, website etc.