Technical and Visual

This was a challenging assignment due to current circumstances.  Technically, I should not have been out taking pictures and so I could only do so in conjunction with other trips out, no small reason as to why therefore that shopping played its part in the assignment.  That said, this is fine as shopping is the accurate window into my life at the moment.  

From a technical perspective, the need to shoot reasonably ad-hoc and to maintain distancing meant that some of my shots were not as well posed or lit as they might have otherwise been.  This is particularly apparent in some of the doorway shots that can be seen in the contact sheets for example IAP A3-149 where the subjects are very badly lit.  Although this can be rescued to an extent in post-processing, it is not as good as getting it right in the first place.  This limited my editing in some cases but, it would have been totally wrong to step foot into the house to place a light source just inside the door.  I feel this has limited my final set to a degree, certainly my ability to produce a set that is only of people.  I think the learning is to stop and take the time to consider lighting a little longer before taking the shot.  I normally shoot slightly underexposed to avoid blown highlights, but in these scenarios I could have exposed more for the people and suffered the consequence for their surroundings for example.

I used two different cameras to collect my shots: a small rangefinder style camera that produces 4×3 images (as it meant I could take it everywhere with me) and a DSLR that produces 3×2 (for shots that I knew would be posed ahead of time).  In processing I found that this made it slightly harder as I needed to crop them all to the same shape and in some cases lost parts of an image I didn’t want to.  Learning here is to switch the frame size of my rangefinder style camera to 3×2 if I know I am going to mix shots, or to frame less tightly to allow cropping later (or use the same camera!).

Visually, aside from some of the lighting challenges, I think the shots are all sharp where they need to be and generally well framed.  I think I have managed to process the images to look consistent despite the use of two different cameras.

Quality of Outcome

I am pleased with the overall quality, I do think that the outcome provides a window into my life at present bearing in mind the very limited opportunity to step outside home. 

The contact sheets show that I captured a lot of images that were nothing to do with the two themes that I have ended up with.  Many of the images that I caught such as totally empty car parks on a Saturday morning or empty supermarket shelves are common on social media and in the press and although these are sights that we all see at the moment, and they are unusual, I didn’t want to produce a set that did not add to the common body of images already available.  Yes I saw them so they would be a window into my life, but I don’t think that they would be personal enough.

What I am particularly pleased about is that the set of images presented is a new and unique insight, a window, into my life.

What I am still struggling to resolve in my mind is whether or not my choice to present essentially two sets as one, firstly family and friends and secondly shopping, strengthens or weakens the assignment.  I have enough images to drop one set and expand the other slightly.  Specifically, I could drop the shopping theme and then expand the people set with some of the images from it.  

I think I am partially influenced by my central image ‘Spread the Love, Not the Virus’ and I wonder if I needed to find a reason to include it, which I have done by choosing to use it as a link between the two sets.

I have experimented with the idea of a single set and this does work but I felt that I was losing something by dropping the shopping set so chose to retain it.  

The issue remains unresolved in my mind.  It could be that my images could be presented as two totally separate sets on different occasions and that would reduce my concern of losing certain images that I think are strong but do not fit into the people set, for example ‘Distancing Measures at Stroud Shambles Market’

Creativity

As already discussed, I am pleased that many of my images are quite unique from the standard COVID images one might see on-line.

For the image of Ken and Steph Wilkinson, my choice to include the fence in shot to emphasise their distancing and the feeling of being locked away is something that I think worked well.  Almost the same image without the fence can be seen in the contact sheets at A3-60 and I don’t think that it is as powerful.  

I am pleased that I found quite a few different ways to illustrate this rather than multiple images of the same thing of people stood in doorways.  Louise Wilks and Chandra Kotak are also distancing images but quite different from each other.

Similar to my unresolved thoughts on the two sets above, I wonder if I could have gone further with the captioning of the people images.  Thinking of Stephen Gill and his Audio Portraits (Gill, 2004), in his series he captures a series of images of people listening to music and captions those images with no name, only the music that they are listening to.  The viewer is left to consider that person alongside this information alone.  I wonder if my idea of cateogrising people according to their age and health condition, which are the two key statistics used to assess COVID risk should have been the only information provided, as per the example below.

I chose not to do this as this category within my assignment was to do with friends and family. However, the combination of dropping the shopping images and amending the people captions as above does create quite an intriguing set of images.  I feel that I would present them in this way if it were not for the brief of the assignment because I feel that it would weaken their link to me.  This for me is unresolved and something to discuss with my tutor ahead of finalising the assignment.

Context and Research

My research into Gill as described above has prompted my thoughts in terms of captioning my images and it also caused me to reconsider how a relatively straightforward portrait image can be seen in a very different ways depending upon the perspective that one has when viewing it.  This was quite a considerable learning for me as the effect is considerable even though the change is small.

Bibliography

Gill, S., 2004. Portfolio » Portfolio. [online] Stephengill.co.uk. Available at: <http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album-1-2/audio-portraits/thumbnails> [Accessed 3 March 2020].