Photography Journal

Idea Developing

Brainstorm

Of

Ideas

Idea Moodboard

Notes For Idea

With this project I want to express more personal work and try to take photography that is a little bit out of my comfort zone. I want to make sure I experiment with both DSLR and Polaroid based photography as I love the idea of having to be picky with the images you take on a polaroid.

The idea I have decided to go with is to create a photo journal where I go and take a journey on a bus route or a train route and take it to every stop and explore for at least 2-3 hours and then photograph people, places and major things whilst also documenting this down on the journal so I can show the major things that make up the city I live in.

The location is vary to change with every day I decide to shoot as I may do 5-6 stops then the next day travel back to the stops afterwards to continue my journey forward.

I have chosen to take either the 25 bus route from Ilford to Oxford Circus or get a Northern line train straight through in 5 stops on every direction.

The idea was inspired by photo journals I saw on Tumblr and the inspiration for the travelling came from an idea I was given by my photography tutor.

With the equipment and the types of photography, I wanted to use both modern and retro types of photography such as Polaroids and DSLR cameras. With the Polaroids I will only shoot 3 in each location as this limits the type of images and the different ideas that come into my head which then allows me to be more picky.

With the DSLR I want to take location shots and portraits to allow the area to express in the journal. I will put the journal on my website here and in physical form so that I can show this in a end of year piece.

Week beginning 17th April

Day by day plan of action from mid week onwards.

Get all equipment ready:

Polaroid
DSLR camera
Journal for the project

Start the journey from Ilford through a few stops.

Week beginning 24th April

Continue shoot through to the next stops after the last stop I went to.

Shoot averagely 15 polaroids in the week.

Landscape shots and portraits X5 each.

Week beginning 1st May

Continue journey.

Polaroids become more limited 10 this week.

Landscape scenics and portraits X5 each.

Log stuff in journal.

Week beginning 8th May

Continue journey.

Polaroids 15 this week.

Landscapes mainly and a few people in portraits X2 each.

Week beginning 15th May

Final lap of journey.

Final 15 polaroids.

Final few people shots and candids. X10

Week beginning 22nd May

Edit all pieces.

Print and adjust journal.

Done.

Changes To Idea

With my initial idea I was going to take a bus route through London and stop at a few stops and take photographs. The bus route that I chose was the 25 bus but it has now been brought to a diversion where it does not go through certain areas of London due to road maintenance so I will still take this bus but the Locations for my shoot will be as follows:

SOHO.

ChinaTown.

Oxford Circus.

Stratford.

Ilford.

Whitechapel.

St Pauls.

These are the locations I will visit on my journey as this is the route adjustments that the bus has put into place. The stops in each area are close to one another so I will get off at 1 stop in the area and walk around.

SOHO London

With this work here I wanted to explore the colours and the brightness of SOHO in London as it is a really colourful place and is very pro LGBTQ+ and embraces this with open arms with the idea that the colours bring the aspect to it linking with the gay flag being the rainbow colours.

The cameras I used for this were the Canon EOS 600D and my Polaroid Instax mini.

The documentation was to show the rawness from SOHO with the shops and the generic vibe it gives off which I ended up finding out to be sexual and very pro gay. The buildings did also contrast this as a lot of them around there were old tudor styled framed buildings and they were also ironically the 'gayest' and 'open' places there was in SOHO.

The lens I used was a zoom lens and then taking the images were from a distance and minor editing was needed for these images just a slight crop to keep the images lines within the frame to attract the viewers.

The feel I wanted was spontaneous and to make sure I gave off a slight tourist feel as I do want to explore the areas in a way that gave a strong new feel to what I should be looking for.

The people I met in the area were only people who were handing out something or were trying to spark a reaction from crowds with singing or by preaching.

With the images I want to achieve next I want them to be completely candid so that it gives a feel of what London is about and what the feel of the area is like so then I can work with them in photoshop and maybe edit them to stand out from the others.

ChinaTown London

With this shoot I really wanted to go with the candid feel and not specifically shoot the ideas and thoughts that came into my head. I really got what I was looking for as the shoot had strong movement and transitions between the people and the scenarios they were put into. The colours here even though it was not planned were really intense and strong as it gave the feel of China Town with the colours China actually works with like the festivals they have and the cherry blossom trees that grow there.

The camera equipment is still the same as last shoot with the idea that I was using my Canon camera with the zoom lens and also the polaroid camera to only grab a few images that had to be planned in order to come out well on the printing stages.

The images came out well especially when I get full bodied images like the last and the pink jacket girl walking with her friend in the street. The colours were strong and the positioning was great but I still find it difficult to get the angles right on the shooting process because the camera would be tilted on one side and I could not find the reason why.

The lighting was given by natural light and diffused easily by the clouds as the day was going to be pretty rainy so I worked with it and the location.

Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand was a really good photographer that would do spontaneous candid photographs that give off a very significant feel like how one person falls in love or capturing the many emotions of various people in a specific area.

The main idea of candid photography to him was 'To explore the area in a light that is overlooked' and this really linked well with me personally and then the thoughts in my head were really making me think about how I can incorporate this to London as it is a new city but same situations happen every single day.

The colouring is not there which does not affect me as much as I can image the photographs with colour and how vibrant they would have been.

The positioning is the same as my last shoot with it being on an angle so I can at least see someone else working with the same issue so it does give me confidence to go out and take photographs the way I do as it is typical for an image to be slanted.

The idea for my next shoot is to directly take the angling and the situations from Winogrand and then explore them in London and find scenarios that are just like these ones here pictured to the left.

Idea Development/Changes

With my initial project idea I wanted to explore the various locations of the local bus route 25 but the bus route was always on diversion so I decided it would be easier to just do a journal that is more personal to me where it documents more electronically about the day by day life and the places I tend to visit. As I have said before the idea was initially to create a journal physically but the time between me taking photos and putting it into context in a journal was to much to do in my project. To make it simpler for myself I will just update this website to show the development and the idea progression. I will have about 8/9 upcoming shoots already planned and experimented which will be expressed more in depth through the page. I also feel with this part of my project I wanted to explore the light and the many manifestations of light itself within photography. The light will be experimented in long exposures and also in just natural light, I will also play around with light painting and also some more adventurous techniques of exploring light and the forms of light.

The equipment will slowly change as well because a lot of my light photography tends to take part during the night where I can have a plain black canvas to use to do my work on. The main equipment piece to change will be polaroid images as they are not the type to dark and large scenes.

With this particular shoot I wanted to explore the many ways the moon and the sun leave light trails with a silhouette. In this particular case I headed up to Hadleigh and explore the ruins of a castle built in 1215 as this gave the area a rise above the lower ground and also had a great view of the Estuary of the Thames. Using my DSLR and a 18-55mm lens I decided to take some scenic shots that were really just in the moment but were sequenced to show a movement of light. The light was caught within bulb mode and was taken over 1 minute every 2 minutes between each shpt facing the same location. The only thing that I did manipulate was the aperture as I wanted to make it get darker over time by just adjusting the aperture to a higher number. I started with an aperture of 5.6 and then ended with 11.

With this shoot I was only showing the movement of the moon and the way it appears within the frame and the castles silhouette. once again playing around with the aperture with the camera on manual mode was the best option as this allowed me to get the different densities of light when the light was refracted from the moon to the camera lens.

I feel the photoshoot went very well as this allowed me to get used to the camera settings more and then also try out many ways of light with just the sun and the moon. The location worked well so I think I may stay with this location for a few more shoots.

Ben Brown

With this particular light experimentation I wanted to go a bit more adventurous and explore the man made sources of light and use them to capture many different forms and then also see how the light looks and manipulate the forms. So I did some LED photography where I left my camera on bulb mode and put on a two minute timed shot of my friend spinning a led light around in a circle whilst hitting the same point on each turn to create this circular effect.

This was followed shortly with the exploration of wire wool and the way where if you light the wool and spun it around really fast then you get this volcano effect where the sparks fly off of the wool and spritz along the floor.

Ben Brown, also known as Mr Ben Brown on YouTube, he is a travel photographer and videographer who likes to show the world in his eyes.

He really uses various different equipment types and also the way he uses natural light in the places he visits is spectacular.

For example the lights in the below images were the ones I really am inspired by as you can see movement and then also see the sky ombre effect.

The locations he goes to are not achievable in this short time frame but I can choose to go to big known locations in London/Essex and look at them in detail.

I will also use a lot of equipment to achieve my images as they can then be more essential to get strong light coming from the images as that is something I want to look into.

Benfleet, Essex

Hadleigh Castle, Essex

With this shoot I was really experimenting with the capacity of light my camera can do and how long for, so with that being said I did some cloud trails where the light goes across the sky and forms shapes of clouds and gives an ombre effect on the sky. This also does light exposure to the stars as the stars come up as streaks and then they give the whole earth movement but the location stays still. The main source of light was the setting sun and the sky having the moon as a source and these images really worked out well where they showed strength to the light and to the silhouettes to come out strong.

Overall the shoot went well especially with the hypothesis of the camera being able to take large and small quantities of light so with that being my main idea and developing point, I want to explore more with direct manipulation.

These photographs were the best out of my overall shots this is because they were all random ideas of maybe using a torch to light up the car in various colours to a long exposure where it shows the light being in its place.

I wanted to explore light on cars and actually tracing cars with the colours that re most prominent with them. The main piece of equipment used was the torch as it had various colour settings on it so using them I got close to the cars and outlined what I felt would be significant to the overall image to get a familiar shape.

With the shoot above I wanted to explore the way that cars create light and the way the light is portrayed over a long period of time. This photography is quite cliche but does get a lot of good image from it in the various locations you can go to across the world. The way the image was taken was by the long exposure of about 2 and a half minutes and then the tripod was set up to be strong in a long distance away or in this case above the road on a fly over.

The camera used was a Canon EOS 600D with a 18-55mm lens and then the image was set to f20 and ISO 100 for a strong sense of light.

Overall with this particular project it really shows my development with the camera skills and also the editing process. The project did start of with a more retro vibe with the polaroid camera and then creating a physical journal but ended with a more concentrated approach to photography by focusing on light and the many forms it comes in with the man made cars/street lights and the natural sunlight.

The camera I personally feel is really a good way to explore these topics and then the approach I took was very effective for me personally as it allowed me to plan and then take the work with me wherever needed. I really like the way I used natural light with long exposure as it gets a trail effect and then the way I do man made long exposures were really good as it had to be all planned out in advance.

I do still feel like there is a lot to try out with light photography such as star trails where the stars can move across the sky and they seem to be streaks instead of little white dots in the sky. The locations worked well for me as I went out and explored areas I have never been before but also simplifying it to show my day by day life and the places I visit with family and the places my family lives in.