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Printing A3's and Test Strips

Micah, Samrawit and I spent most of the day in the Print Lab today printing off our A3 prints to show to Daniel and Simon on Tuesday. We played around with the layout and how we want to show the images as a series which you can see simply in the image above. We decided that Micah’s image of the large generator was going to be printed the largest at just under a metre in width. I chose three images of the dial attached to a pipe, the series of labelled pipes (both of which are pictured above) and lastly a photo of a waste water pipe close up. I am planning on printing these to fit within the size of an A3 piece of paper in landscape form. When they are exhibited they will be displayed one under each other, in landscape form. Samrawit has chosen the 4 images above to be printed at A3 size also and displayed in portrait orientation in a grid as pictured. It was really nice to see the work larger and up together in close to it’s final form and we were all very happy with the result.

We spent the rest of the time organising our test strips to send off to Printspace with the help of Daniel. Hopefully we should be able to pick them up toward the end of this week ready to show to Daniel next Tuesday. We have decided to have our finals printed onto the Kodak C-type Metallic surface.

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Plan for mid term exhibition

Things have been moving forward progressively over the past few weeks in preparation for the mid term exhibition. Unfortunately we have not been able to access the plant room this week and will not be able to until next week. This has hindered the progress a lot, especially with regards to my side of the project. I'm working with the idea of water and how it is invisible within a building. I would like to focus my work upon the interaction of water pipes to the building they are within. I have two artistic ideas as how to show this. The junctions of pipe work is fascinating, the way the pipes snake in and out of one another on the way to their end destination. It is a completely organised and planned chaos that has been designed to completely integrate within the shell of the building. Because of this chaotic but organised nature I really want to photograph the pipes close up, to emphasise the curves and shapes that the pipe work has been designed to make but also the way in which they interact with each other. Another area I want to focus on is the entry points of the pipes into the building. This is often interesting as every hole has been specifically cut to the size of the pipe that is going to go inside it, ensuring a snug fit and no more space being taken up than needed. However there are holes that are not so perfect, that have been chiselled and altered for maintenance or just purely because they could not fit in the first place. Again I would like to photograph this relationship between the building and the pipe work that transports the water. Because we haven't been able to access the plant room I will be exhibiting some of my photos from when we visited the roof of K2 in order to give an idea of the sort of direction my work is going to go. We are also thinking of printing a photo we did take down in the plant room which is a wide angle shot of the main plant area. We would like to see if we can print this A1/A0 size to really give impact.

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Research

With our brief focussing on the ‘Invisible Building’ we really wanted to push the boundaries of what we may be able to achieve with photographic equipment. Building Services is very much to do with the internal arterial systems that make up the very essence of a building. This could be; Heating, Air Conditioning, Electricity, Water Flow, Etc. Once a building is completed almost all of these services are completely invisible to any one inside of the building. So how do we make them visible again? Well we have decided to delve into the realms of thermal and infra-red, two accessible, but definitely invisible sources of energy within a building.

With regards to Infra-red the name Richard Mosse springs to mind. His use of infra-red film to document the conflict in the Eastern Congo was groundbreaking. It completely changed the way in which these people had been perceived and the conflict was being documented. The infra-red film altered the greens of the endless vegetation that resides in the rainforests of the Congo and converted them into bold pinks and purples, bringing a whole new feel to the story behind the images.

In fact the image below could very well be shown now as a fashion editorial image for how it is composed.

The second photographer is Linda Alterwitz, who uses a camera that detects radiant heat, instead of light, uncovering hidden thermal signatures in everyday scenes. Her work is stunning and brings a new meaning to the invisible.

We are yet to find out if the universities thermal imaging camera shows us colours for its heat representation, or just black and white. Once we know this we can start to really delve into the creativity of using this to uncover the invisible within our own buildings.

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Building Services Test Shoot

This afternoon we went up to the top of K2 to have a look around all the plant equipment and specified room for housing it all. We also visited the roof and were given a guided tour of what each piece of equipment was called and what it was used for. This provided us with an insight into the things that we could possibly shoot in the future for our final piece, but also to get an idea about how these pieces of machinery have an impact on the building we are in without us even noticing. Here are some of the test shots I took.

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After shooting our images we went straight to the print lab to work in our images. During our shoot we decided to shoot digital in order to save us some time but also to benefit from the higher quality of image. The weather was also so dark and misty from the rain that shooting film just would have render d us with some really low res images that would have been muddy and unclear. We managed to work out which images we wanted to use through a process of trial and error. We wanted them all to be desaturated but somehow tie together through the colours within each image. Once we had chosen our images we started by dropping the saturation and trailing out a test quadryptic in photoshop in order to visualise our idea. It was then that we decided which image was going to go where which took a lot of deliberation and discussion. We tested out a few test sheets which revealed that the printer was printing much darker than we wanted the image to look, meaning I had to push up the exposure by around 1.30. This then fixed this problem and resulted in four images we were happy with.

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Second Group Task

After our Tuesday lecture we decided to meet up again as a group. Jemima thought of an idea that I agreed with and that we wanted to undertake with the rest of our group. We spoke to them about heading back to the South Bank area but instead heading inland away from the river to areas that are less popular. Last week we went to the Tate Gallery but this week we wanted to show the contrast of footfall, architecture and environment in an area that is literally a few steps away from such a bustling and well known area. We decided that we wanted to shoot on 35mm film to almost bring back the historic feel of the once bustling suburban area. We also decided that we wanted to go during the morning, close to sunrise, in the hope to capture the early morning light and maybe even a low cloud/mist. We realised that this early light and cloudy weather, coupled with the use of film would result in a quite unsaturated image, again complementing the feel that we wanted to achieve.

We were inspired by the work of Richard Wentworth in his project 'Making do and getting by'. In this work he walks around cities and takes photos of scenes that have been created by others, by accident or on purpose.

Examples of Richards work:

We want our photos to portray a message of how there is two sides to London and how the contrast between areas of high popularity and low popularity can literally be footsteps away from each other. We want to show the silent almost desolate nature of these residential areas at such a time. We want to get these exposures developed onto a disc in high quality. Then load them into photoshop in the print lab. We don't want to edit the photos too much as we want them to be as raw as possible. The only edit we may do is to reduce the vibrancy to give the desaturated effect. We then want to print the images onto A4 photo paper as 1:1 squares. We want to arrange the images as quadriptychs.

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Contemporary Photography Commissions Brief 1

The first brief for Contemporary Photography Commissions involves photographing different areas of London South Bank University to create an exhibition which coincides with the schools 125 anniversary. The aim of the resulting work is to be “visually exciting, conceptually engaging, and made in collaboration with staff and/or students from another area of the university.”

In week three each group is given a more specific area within the University to concentrate on. The regions currently being considered but also open for development include: enterprise, the student body, sustainability, the location of the university, innovation, and communities.

Any expenses incurred during production including costs to print and mount will taken from each groups budget of 1,000 pounds.

The timeline for this brief:

21/02/17 - persent project idea as a group for sign off

14/03/17 - present images in progress to client for feedback

02/05/17 - present final edit for approval

23/05/17 - work ready for submission

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First Group Task

For our first brief we had to go out in our groups and do something ‘fun’ and document it in any way we saw fit. We all sat down and decided that we would like to go and have a look around the Tate but also go out for some lunch together just to continue to break the ice. We thought that a cool way to document this would be for me to wear a GoPro camera strapped to my chest, and film our day together. This worked really well and the footage was really fun and engaging. We thought this would be different to how most others would document it. I edited the footage in Final Cut Pro X as I am very able with the software.

We decided to sync the footage over the top of Intro by The XX, a song which we all like.

I only needed to do some basic editing to the footage. GoPro footage is notoriously unsaturated straight out of the camera so my first port of call was to apply some colour correction in the form of a ‘Film Colour LUT’ (Look Up Table).

Before: