'A View Through My Eyes'

At the beginning of A2 Photography, we were set a 'photography challenge', which was numerous bullet points we had to respond to. One of these was 'a view through something.' I decided to give a view through my eyes (I am short sighted). The photo below shows roughly how I saw the view without my glasses - I couldn't get it quite right and this in fact shows it better than I can actually see. 

This photo shows the same view, but how I saw it with my glasses. I purposely included the glasses in the shot, round the edge of the frame to show visibly what I was trying to represent in the photo above.

I have chosen to develop this idea into my personal investigation for A2 Photography because people with perfect vision will never know what it is like to see with a vision impairment. How I see is a difficult thing to explain verbally, so the visual medium of photography is perfect.

A National Geographic photographer called Joe McNally completed an assignment for the magazine in 1992 titled 'The Sense of Sight'. He only really explored blindness and complete sight loss, whereas I want to explore partial vision impairment  but his photographs were a good starting point.

These next two photos are initial shots for my personal investigation. The pier at Brighton is an iconic sight and here's how I saw it without my glasses on:

These two photos illustrate well what it is like to be short sighted because in the one above you can see all how the individual pieces of metal , so clearly visible in the one below, blur together into an indistinct shape, with all the detail removed. In the one above you can still see the pier, but not very clearly.

I printed the photo above huge - four A3 sheets tall by four A3 sheets wide and people with perfect vision who have seen it have said it does create a feeling of confusion and that it make their eyes feel weird. However this isn't as big as I would like it to be, because when you stand in front of it, you can see things out of you peripheral vision that isn't the picture. One final piece idea that I have had is to print this photo (or another one I'm yet to take that shows a feeling of confusion more effectively), or project it, so big that when a person is standing in front of it, it is all they would be able see. I would present this at one end of a darkened room, with the only light source in the room being the lighting focused on this massive photograph. This would make sure the viewer is only focused on the photograph and hopefully being in the room will create a feeling of confusion.

The photo of the sunset has an abstract, painterly  feel to it, but it also has a feeling of confusion created by the 'unfocus'. This is one of the aspects I want to explore: the feeling of vulnerability and confusion created when I take my glasses off. Of course this doesn't just happen to me, but anyone with short sightedness, or other vision impairments. One idea I have to make this project less personal and more about vision impairment in general is to take photos of people, in the style of August Sander, with their glasses on, their glasses off and then a photograph of how they see. 

Following this theme of making it more general, I used a pair of my dad's old glasses because he is much more short sighted than me and has prism lenses. I thought these glasses with a much stronger prescription would emphasis the short sighted effect much more than mine, and they did. 
This first photo I took was mainly to document the strength of the glasses, which is why the glasses are parallel to the frame of the photo.

In the photo below, I wanted to focus on the feeling of confusion created by the strength of the prescription, so I tilted the camera off horizontal and made the glasses not parallel to the frame. This makes the viewer tilt their head when looking at the photo, which creates a feeling of confusion.

Breaking Down

Watch the video first.

My inspiration for this series was the song 'Breaking Down' by Florence + The Machine. I had the idea when I was listening to the song for one of the first few times. At first the song seems quite innocent, but when you really listen to it, you realise it's actually quite dark. This is the same as the photos: at first they seem quite innocent because of the teddy bear, but as you see the photos playing with the song, you realise it is actually quite dark too. The seemingly innocent teddy bear actually represents the girl breaking down.

This is the series of photos, just as images without the music:

I presented the video as an installation piece. I projected the video onto a wall of a darkened room. I had a lamp in one corner, with the teddy sitting next to it. The photos below show the installation, which was titled:

Window To Another World

I discovered Przemek Nawrocki on this website. I really like how he seamlessly blends photography with the digital, however the image above (of the horse) is quite a stereotypical photoshopped image. It's quite dreamy and romantic. I am really interested in digital art and I've taught myself to use Photoshop, and I wanted to try out more ambitious projects. My favourite work by Nawrocki is the one of the horse galloping through, what I think of as, 'a window between worlds. I explored this idea to create a couple of photos I titled 'A Window Between Worlds'. I also had in my mind, when I was creating these, the book 'The Subtle Knife' by Philip Pullman because in the book the characters Will and Lyra jump between different worlds,  by tearing through the fabric between these worlds. 

This is a sketchbook page showing the lead up to my first 'Window Between Worlds' piece. I edited together my own photographs, you can see the originals at the bottom of the sketchbook page.

(I only edited the text on the page above because in my sketch book the final image was above this page, on this blog it is below.)

This is my first 'Window Between Worlds' piece: 

It is much more aggressive than Nawrocki's picture of the horse, because of the aggressive looking helicopter coming through from one world to another.

This is the sketchbook page for my second 'Window Between Worlds' piece.

It originally looked like this without the person:




























This is the final outcome:

 

I am really pleased with the final outcome. The person coming through the 'window' makes the image so much more interesting. My aim was to create something futuristic-looking, I think I have succeeded. The viewer questions the image. Who is the person? Where are they from? Are they from the past arriving in the future or vice versa or are they just moving from one place to another? 

My two pieces are similar in their idea to Nawrocki's work, because looking at his work gave me the idea, but mine are different from his because they are more subtly photoshopped, yet it is still obvious that they have been edited. 

Darkroom Processes and Analogue Photography

The first pinhole camera I made:

This is my first pin hole photograph, shot using the Pringles can, and the positive of it made using Photoshop, rather than  darkroom  processes, because I couldn't get it to work in the darkroom.

This is the test strip and the failed positive.

I then moved on from shooting pinhole photography outside, to trying to get a good pinhole photograph inside. These were my first two attempts, using the Pringles can camera.

 This is an explanation of the second pinhole camera I made because the Pringles can leaked light through the lid, creating an over exposed semi-circle at the bottom of the photos.

I used this better pinhole camera to take photos inside, these are my first four attempts. The photo on the top left is the image I was trying to capture, but shot with my DSLR and turned into black and white in Photoshop.

This is my best negative from five attempts to get a good pinhole photograph inside. It was exposed for half an hour. 

 I then turned this into a positive in the darkroom and the result is below and is my final out come for pinhole photography.

Creating and using a pinhole camera sparked my interest in analogue and darkroom processes, so when I was introduced to the work of August Sander, for A2 Photography, and asked to take some portraits in his style, I decided to shoot them on film and shot an entire roll of just portraits in his straight on style  I used an old Pentax with a 50mm lens at f/2, which took nice portraits because the background was out of focus due to the shallow depth of field. I didn't trust myself to develop the film (what if I did something wrong and lost the whole roll?) so I sent it off to get it developed. However, when I got the negatives back, I created many prints from them in the darkroom.

The smaller prints, in groups of three are the ones sent back with the developed negatives. They haven't been created using the traditional darkroom methods, the negatives were scanned in and then the images were printed as these digital files. You can really tell the difference between these and the ones I printed in the darkroom. My prints (the larger ones in groups of two) are much softer than the scanned prints and they are true black and white (which unfortunately you can't really tell in these photos of my sketchbook pages, while the scanned prints are slightly sepia-toned.