Time

During the course of this project I feel I have developed many skills and learnt some new things along the way. The artists I researched for this project especially, helped me to gain a lot of ideas and inspiration for this project and I especially liked going out and experimenting with different styles and also different cameras. Before this project I hadn’t really used film at all, during the project I got to develop my own film and then create prints from the negatives which I found really interesting.

During the project we also experimented with multiple exposures which again, I hadn’t really done before and I think this was a good skill to learn as I think the outcomes look effective and I really liked the style of the studio image I created using a 5x4 monorail camera.

For my ideas in this project I wanted to create three long exposures of cars at night to try and capture the essence of rush hour. I also wanted to create my other three pieces on a similar style to Henri Cartier Bresson but shooting band photography as this is something I am interested in. I wanted to capture three images that were at the ‘perfect’ moment.

For the images of cars at night using long exposure photography, I visited quite a few different locations to shoot my images, until I found three places I liked to shoot my mages. The first places I visited had street lights above the road and I wasn’t too keen on this showing in my final pieces as I thought it distracted attention away from the car lights. Below are the three final images I chose and edited.

I was pleased with how my final pieces turned out as the emphasised the car lights, which is what I set out to do and also I think they capture rush hour like I wanted. However, I think with the images the roundabout one doesn’t look like it fits too much to the set and although I really liked this image I think it would have looked better from a higher angle looking down on the roundabout, but unfortunately this was not possible.

For my three decisive moment images I took photos at gigs of a band I know called Ashestoangels. I wanted my set of three images to work well together and really capture the decisive moment, which is quite hard in itself but even harder when the band are constantly running and moving around and also the low light situations I was working in as well. Below are my three final images.

I am happy with how these images turned out as I think each of them do show the decisive moment well. I cropped them into squares as this helped to show movement and focused the eye more onto the image. I think in hindsight I could have made them either all colour or all black and white, however the others looked better in black and white and the centre image didn’t so I put the colour image in the centre to make it fit more and I think this works as a set of images.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I learnt new skills, like how to use the old style film cameras, the 5x4 monorail, the Ricoh KR-10M and the Pentax film camera and I really enjoyed experimenting with these. I also enjoyed developing my own film, even though it was quite hard to do I think it worked out well and working in the darkroom was something else I had never done before so I found this quite interesting and insightful to do. I still prefer shooting in digital though as I like being able to get instant feedback on the images I shoot and also it’s more practical for the type of photography I like to shoot. I think my two sets of images worked out well and given the amount of experimenting and testing ideas done beforehand I think this helped my images turn out much better than if I hadn’t done much experimenting before creating my final pieces.