Exercise: Rain

Imagine a magazine cover on one subject; Rain. You have the entire cover space to work in. You should produce a single, strong, attractive photograph, that leaves no one in doubt about the subject.

Below are some guidelines:

• Keep it simple
• Think of all the effects of rain that you have ever seen
• Be interesting, don’t settle for an ordinary middle-distance shot of a street in the rain
• With some photographs, you don’t need to wait for a rainy day
• Make it attractive

I decided to convert it to Black and White to see if it would have a more dramatic look, and I am happy with the result.

Exercise: Juxtaposition

For this exercise, choose either a still life approach, or a larger scale shot. If you choose to do a still life shot, take any book you like, and make a suitable cover illustration using two or three relevant elements.

I decided to research what Juxtaposition meant. Juxtaposition is to put side by side: to place two or more things together, especially in order to suggest a link between them or emphasize the contrast between them.

I decided to choose two of my favourite novels rather than just one. I chose The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

The Great Gatsby:

The Great Gatsby: Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F.Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, Idealism, Social Upheaval, Excess and creates a portrait of the Jazz age, and the American Dream in the 20’s.

This is the cover I have on my copy of the novel: It portrays one of Gatsby’s extreme parties.

For my novel cover, I decided to go with the still life approach. I chose some objects which I thought would be suitable in portraying the Gatsby themes. Its all about, diamonds, glamour, cars, pearls, the eyes of Dr.TJ Eckleburg and the breakdown of relationships. My objects are obviously more modern than items which would have been on a cover in the 20’s, however, I chose objects that sum up the novel, or would be recognisable to someone who has read the novel beforehand. I think the photograph has come out really well.

The Great Gatsby ( My Cover )

The Kite Runner:

The Kite Runner is a novel written by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. It is based in Afghanistan, and tells the story of a young boy Amir, and his Hazara Servant Hassan. There are themes of Guilt, Redemption, Violence, War, Taliban and Love. The kite is very symbolic and it travels throughout the novel symbolising guilt, loyalty, redemption and lots more. Instead of a still life set up for my interpretation of the cover, I decided to make a silhouette. I wanted a simple cover, yet I wanted something powerful and striking, so that if you were to walk past a book store and see this on a novel, you would stop and look. I chose simple white paper for the cut out, and a plain black background. I photoshoped the white paper and made it more whiter so it would be bold, and stand out more.

This is the cover I have on the novel.

I got my influence from the DVD cover I have of the film.

The Kite Runner ( My Cover )

Original (Without Photoshop)

  

Exercise: Symbols

The most obvious symbols, those that spring to mind first, are often so well used, that they are hackneyed. However, it is often possible to overcome the most well worn symbol by treating it in an original or interesting way.

The idea of this exercise, is to find symbols for a number of concepts. Complete it by listing more than one symbol for each of the following subjects, and add a short note saying how you might use them in a photograph. You do not need to take any photographs for this.

The subjects are:

Growth

Plants, Seeds, Children, Hair, Nails, Ruler, Measuring tape, Companies

Excess

Food, Body weight, Alcohol, Skin, Hair,

Crime

Knives, Hoodies, Guns, Burglar, Broken objects, Graves, Police

Silence

Sadness, Tears, Crying, Empty rooms, Books, Library, Mediation, Church, Prayer, Gliding

Poverty

Homeless, Starving, Unclean, Hunger, Death, Sadness

Exercise: Evidence of Action

For this exercise, you were asked to produce one photograph in which it can be seen that something has happened. As a suggestion, included in the photograph something that has either been broken, or emptied.

For this, I looked again at the work of Gregory Crewdson, and Jeff Wall.

Gregory Crewdson

Jeff Wall (The destroyed room 1978)

With both of these images, they show a ‘mess’ and items which are ‘broken’. Taking influence from these images, I decided to photograph a cupcake which had been half eaten but made to look ‘broken’ or ‘torn apart’ .

I decided to use a spot lamp with a diffuser for this image, as I wanted a strong yellow colour from the icing, but I didn’t want the photograph itself to be too exposed.

 

 

Exercise: A Narrative Picture Essay

This project requires you to set yourself an assignment and then photograph it. Based on what you have learnt so far, tell a story of any kind, in a set of pictures. It could be something as simple as preparing some food.

Keep in mind that ultimately the success of your narrative will depend on how interesting, attractive and varied your photographs are.

The way you lay out the final selection of photographs is very important.

Before I began this exercise, I decided to study several photographers, who use narrative within their photography.

Jeff Wall:

Wall is a well known Canadian photographer and artist , who has been in the art scene since the early 1970s. I researched his work in the Tate Modern. Wall is well known for his large scale colour transparencies, mounted in wall-hung light boxes.  Wall describes his work as being ‘typified by two approaches, which he characterises as either cinematographic or documentary’.

When you first view Wall’s images, they appear to be ‘Snap shots’ and taken at the ‘Right moment’, however, they have all been composed meticulously down to the fine detail, and many of his photographs have needed crew and staging crew in order for him to create his final pieces. They are all narrative images, and they all have some story behind them, some more obvious than others.

Jeff Wall ( Card Players, 2006 )

Gregory Crewdson:

Crewdson is a well known American photographer. He is known for his elaborately staged scenes of American homes and Families. His photographs are very macabre, dramatic, and sometimes feature surreal events or ‘disturbing’ scenes. His work is somewhat similar to Jeff Wall, as he too uses a large crew to help stage the scene before he begins shooting. However, Crewdson’s work is more cinematic than Wall’s. Every photograph has a narrative and tells a story.

Gregory Crewdson (Sunday Roast)

Richard Billingham:

Billingham is an English photographer and artist, who is well known for his photo book ‘Ray’s A Laugh’ which documents the story of his alcoholic father, and ‘obese, heavily tattooed mother’, living in poverty and deprivation. Which Billingham himself grew up in. Unlike Wall and Crewdson’s work, Billingham’s photographs were taken as snap shots, and were not staged. His images were taken using the cheapest 35mm film he could find, thus producing old fashioned, bold, brash coloured, and bad focus images. However, this series of narrative pictures are authentic, and we as the audience are able to be part of his story just by viewing the series of images. His work is very truthful, and we are able to see his parents true personalities.

Ray’s A Laugh (Photo book – 1996)

Exercise:

For this exercise, I decided to create a narrative picture essay of cooking dinner. My Mother gladly offered to let me photograph her whilst she prepared the food. Some of these images have been cropped and enhance using Photoshop Elements 9.

1: Heating the pan, let the butter melt.

2: Time to peel the potatoes

3: Chop, Chop

4: Add some water, so they can boil.

5: Chopping the onions, time for the tears.

6: Onions are ready for frying.

7: Time to open the sweet corn.

8: Washing the Chicken.

9: Cutting the chicken.

10: Mmmm, Barbecue powder…

11: Mix the chicken into the powder

12: The pan is ready for the chicken.

13: Ready to fry….

14: Mix the onions into the barbecue flavour, and fry.

15: Mix in with the chicken.

16: Served, and ready to eat!

17: Too much! Eyes were bigger than my belly…..

18: Washing up is ready……

After this exercise, you then had to lay your final photographs out in order on a piece of paper, and see how they would look. The way you lay out the final selection of photographs is very important. You have to decide if some of them should be small or larger than the others, In order to create a better narrative effect.

I decided to lay mine out on a word document and then took a screen shot in order to post my final lay out on here.

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Project: Narrative

In photography, a narrative is the way of telling a story through a set of pictures. On the whole, this is usually easier than the alternative of trying to sum up a story in one single photograph.

A set of photographs like this is called a Picture Essay. They can contain anything from 3 or 4 photograph or in some cases, a dozen or more.

Before I started the narrative project, I decided to research more into picture essays, photojournalism and narrative photography so I could gain some more knowledge of what was needed of my photographs.

Photojournalism:

Photojournalism is a form of journalism which uses images and photographs in order to tell a news story, for publication or broadcast. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism.

The one rule in photojournalism is that the work is both honest and impartial, whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms.

Photojournalism is a form of narrative photography, and I suppose in some cases, can be picture essays especially if used in magazines etc as you can use more than one image, making it a picture essay and not just one photograph which sums up the story.

I found a powerful photograph by Samuel Aranda who won the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year. Even though this isn’t a picture essay, this image is extremely powerful and tells a story (Narrative).

‘Narrative photography is the idea that photographs can be used to tell a story’ Wikipedia.

Duane Michals : An American photographer who uses photography to create interesting, and unusual photo sequences and narratives. He worked mostly around themes, investigating; love, emotion, philosophy, life and
death. He also used text to strengthen the narrative.

Duane Michals work on the other hand, uses more than one photograph, which makes it a picture essay (Narrative essay).

Paradise Regained 1968

Putting the subject first

In this project, we will look at photography not just as the skills you need to produce good images, but in terms of what you can do with it. Many photographers pay more attention to the graphic content than to the subject matter.

The larger part of photography however, is directed towards its subject, whatever that may be. A news photograph, for example, generally stands out or falls on how successfully it informs us about a person or an event, and this tends to outweigh any master of, for example, colour or composition.

Example: The Royal Wedding. News Photograph. This photographs informs us on the event, yet, the composition of the people within the image is not the best, it is still a photograph which informs.

Of course, however important the subject of a photograph is, the image will always be improved if it is skilfully handled.

For this small project, and in order for you to gain some kind of perspective, scour any of your own photographs or that of others. Choose two photographs.

The first photograph must show the subject, but it must have little importance within the image, and the image making skills, such as colour, lighting or composition, must be the paramount focus of the image.

The second photograph should be the opposite. The subject needs to be the main focus in the image, and the image making skills, must be less important such as the example above of the royal wedding.

Photograph One: Subject of less importance:

Photograph Two: Subject with strong importance: