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Photography – Part 4 – Project 1: P. 151 Research Point

Read Gareth Dent’s article ‘Dealing with the flood…’ on www.weareoca.com

  • If you use social media, spend a few minutes reflecting on how you use  photography within it, particularly if you engage in photography in other contexts as well.

I use Facebook and Instagram, Instagram more than Facebook nowadays. Instagram is obviously a very photo-based platform, but I rarely post much on my personal account anymore. I do post on my weight loss account though, progress pictures and other random shots of me. I used to post a lot of photos of my kids when they were younger, mostly when I … Read the rest

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Photography – Part 4: Exercise 2

This exercise asks us to look through a photo album to look for any ‘artistic’ photos and to note down what it is about these particular images that makes them more like artworks than some of the others. Is it because they capture a particular moment or event that you’ll never be able to re-create, for example? Is it the background, the light, or the effort that you know went into taking it?

I couldn’t find a lot of photos  of mine that were particularly artistic, but I have presented a few below – normal snapshots on the right, attempts … Read the rest

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Photography – Part 4 – Project 1: P. 150 Research Point

This research point asks us to make notes on John A. Walker’s essay ‘Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning’ (available here) along with our own thoughts on the issue.

Firstly, Walker talks about the range of contexts that photographs can be found and how this changes the meaning.

He goes on to say that a photograph is enclosed within its own frame and that ‘…it is natural for us to mentally place in brackets the context in which the photograph is viewed…’. i.e. we do not usually consider the context that we are viewing the photo in, we … Read the rest

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Photography – Part 4 – Exercise 1

We are asked to think about what we believe makes photographs a unique art form, and then about their production in relation to time and what exactly we mean by ‘photographic image’.

Some things that make photographs unique from other art forms, for example, paintings:

  • The same subject can be captured from different angles, distances, viewpoints and heights in a very short amount of time and with little effort, just by moving the camera. Changes to exposure ad aperture are also quick to do in order to alter the lighting and atmosphere. If you wanted to make these changes to
… Read the rest
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Photography – Part 4 – Project 1: P. 146 Research Point

This first research point in the photography section asks us the read the introductory sections of The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot (available at www.thepencilofnature.com and also as a PDF file here – both accessed 22/02/20) and answer the following:

Do you see photography as mechanical or creative? Can any process be both?

Having been interested in photography for many years, I have always believed that it is both mechanical and creative. In other words, both science and art.

In Talbot’s introduction to The Pencil of Nature, he mostly discusses the mechanics and chemical processes involved in … Read the rest