One Square Mile

There are many ways to document a square mile and photographers can do it differently. Some photographers can document a square mile through still life, portraits, landscape photography and street photography. 

Photographers who do this are: 

Mark Power:

These images are taken from his series 'Sound of two songs'. These images were taken in Poland when Mark went in September 2004 as part of project by Magnum. The project was about the effects of EU membership. The photographs were taken over a period of 5 years where Mark Powers was accompanied by a Polish photographer called Konrad Pustola. Mark Power documented Poland by photographing the landscapes and people's portraits he met along the way, from his point of view as a foreigner.  

These are some photographs from his project of Poland's landscapes. Mark has a variety of angles which the photographs were taken from. The angles work well because its interesting to see different views of the scenery.

These photographs are of some of the people Mark Power's met during his time in Poland.  In the first photograph the man is dressed in neutral colours which match the background he is in as there are no vibrant colours only dull greys with a hint of yellow but that could be to draw your attention to the man stood in front of it. There is a lot of empty space above the man which adds tension to the photograph because it does look more interesting when you look at the image as a whole but it makes you wonder why it was included. 

In this photograph the vibrant colours of the people's clothes with the graffiti in the background as well as the green branch above them looks like Mark Power's waited a long time to take the photograph as he was waiting for the right subjects.

Also in this photograph the green jumpsuit the man is wearing could indicate he works in the building he is stood in front. This photograph is differently shot compared to the other two as there is a shallow DOF. 

I like Mark Power's images because he not only documented the scenery he documented people as well. 

Richard Avedon. 

Richard Avedon is best known for fashion and portraiture work especially when he was working for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue photographing the models with emotion in their facial expression instead of being emotionless.Richard Avedon also did documentary photography as he said "I've photographed just about everyone in the world, But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrities''. He documented projects such as 'New York Life', 'Civil Rights Movement' and 'Mental Institute'.

These photographs are from his project 'The American West' where Richard photographed people and got to know them by their occupation, age and where they lived. 

  

Robert Polidori.

 Robert Polidori documents the effects of destruction and isolation and travelled to many countries to document this. Some countries include India, Ukraine, USA, France and many others. Robert Polidori photographs the mark that humans leave on places and why people have fled. He uses a large format camera and slow shutter speeds for his work. One of his projects is the Chernobyl remains. In May 2001 he spent three days photographing Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and a town called Pripyat which is in the exclusion zone.  

This photograph is of the school cafeteria.

 This photograph is of the control room in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

 This photograph is of a hallway in the school.

 This photograph is of an operating room in the hospital.

 This photograph is of the waiting room at the hospital.

Here are my photographs:

Here I changed my white balance to see which setting would make the leaves on the grass look more saturated.

As I walked past college I saw litter all over the floor so I tried to capture that as I was walking.

At first I started to take pictures of anything as I didn't know what to do but as I kept taking more pictures I was interested in the architecture and the scenery around it so I photographed that.
My camera was set to 7.1 aperture and the shutter speed ranged from 30th of a second to 160th. I was working around the f number because I wanted my photographs to be detailed. I didn't use flash in my images because it was a foggy day and it was bright so flash would have been overpowering and overexposed the sky or unnoticeable on the objects I was photographing such as the buildings as they are large and I took them from far away. 
 I hardly had any people in my photographs which helped the content as I think they would cause a distraction from the buildings. 
Towards the end of taking my photographs I realised that my narrative was going to be about litter scattered over the floor. Whereas when I started my narrative was architecture and scenery. 
I didn't have a narrative but taking these photographs was interesting as I really like documentary photography.

Introduction to Magazines & Research

Types of magazines:

* Fashion

*Music

*Art & Photography

*Lifestyle

*Sports

*Business & Finance

*Entertainment & TV

*Health & Fitness

*Wedding

*Cooking & Food

*Women's

*Men's
*Children

Using InDesign cs4 we have attempted to make our own magazine layout.


First we created some A4 pages with 3 columns then we added a word document by going to file, place and then finding the word document then selecting add. I pasting the text a few times to look like there is more in the columns as it was only a short piece of writing. Then we added pictures the same way we added text.  

This is a print screen of just the text in the columns.

                          This is a print screen of the text and pictures with the guides showing.

                     
                              This is a preview of the magazine page without the guides.

Although this was just a quick rush job if I had taken the time to make a proper one it would be more interesting.

Here are some magazine layouts which captured my eye because of their wacky layouts.

 

Abstract Fear: Task 6 and 7

Installation Layout:

These are the photographs I printed:

This is a link to my finished video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObxB1qtY8_U&feature=youtu.be

It was a last minute thought about printing off some pictures and writing in camomile lotion on the windows because my installation would have been more decorated. I decided to write in camomile lotion on the windows because its easy to wipe off and I used it for some of my photographs as I wanted a dripping effect to give a frightening atmospheric chill. This technique was one I kept going back to because I felt it worked better than other materials I used for writing messages with. I wrote with lipstick, marker pen, cocktail sticks, salt, scrabble and typing on a laptop. 

The reason why I chose so many materials to work with was because in the program paranormal witnesses there was one particular story which influenced most of the threatening messages because the family offered a cat ornament to the poltergeist as a sign of piece but one member didn't want to and threw the cat outside then the next day the word 'cat' was written all over their house in felt tips and food. In this episode the poltergeist also shows his inhumanly footprints and hand prints which gave me a final push on photographing these. 

Another last minute idea was to include the figure of the person in the long black coat to fit with my story which was my own making of a paranormal witnesses documentary. My story was going to be a time lapse showing burglary in my house showing a previous owner dying after being attacked by some robbers then the ghost contacting the new owners that moved in asking for help but after a while of being ignored the ghost starts to turn violent resulting in now being a poltergeist and then ending the story in a mystery not knowing what happened. I also didn't want the person to be in any of the photographs or to be revealed if it was a man or a woman because it wasn't relevant to me. I wanted the black figure in my installation to show that even though the person is dead its still there in spirit but now there in body form.

 But after talking to teachers there was nothing abstract about my work. So my ideas were changed and this was the order of my photographs and videos:

 Help messages, sewing machine moving and reverse it, light swinging, rocking chair moving, piano playing, ornaments moving, scary messages, trashed room, static of TV, footprints on the floor, clothes being thrown and then the family praying for help. 

I noticed when I was taking my videos that if I recorded them at night then the quality would be poor so they had to be recorded again but during daylight but not bright morning daylight because that made some of my photographs too bright and I didn't want that to happen to my videos. As I didn't have the death sequence photographs at the start of my DVD I slotted some photographs in between videos and during videos. I found that the photographs I had sliced during videos would cause them not to be seen by the video skipping over the image when I played it back so I couldn't do this effect a lot which was disappointing as I thought this technique was amazing. It was suggested to me by a teacher and I feel it made my DVD a whole lot better than I would have imagined as I was upset that I had to change my ideas and stuck as to how to resolve the issue. Editing my videos together was quite difficult as I'd never done any video work before but I was very pleased with it.

I am very pleased with the layout of my installation because of all the details I put into it which made my set up feel homely from ornaments on the window top to table cloths under the table lamps and the chair with the foot stool. I had elements of different photographs set up which was intentional for example the footsteps on the floor, the broken ornament laid out on the table (which in my picture was sprawled out on the floor), the dark hooded person and the ornaments on the window which had been knocked down. Even though some people might have been able to guess how my videos were taken I hope that some were a mystery and intrigued people to keep watching.