Second Salford Quays shoot experiments...

I went back to Salford Quays as the first time i went it wasnt very succsessful as it was heavily raining. This time was more succsessful unfortunatley blogger isnt letting me upload my experiments although i have stuck them into my sketchbook.

I usually like to stick to the more traditional type of photography and havent really tried much experimenting with more technical side of things, graphics and photoshop based images. This time i felt i should challenge myself as it was a new thing to me and i have learnt a lot along the way especially about photoshop. I feel for a first time using photoshop to basically make one image into something completely new and innovative i have done a good job.

I would love to experiment more with photoshop as im sure there's a load more i don't know about it.

Experiments

As the weathers been pretty miserable recently i havent been able to get out to take the photograph's that ive wanted to so i decided to experiment with some of the images i already had from the urban walk.


I really liked Doug Aitken's triangular shapes to his works and i am quite confident on photoshop so decided to have a play around with the perspective tool. Here are my results...

I have printed these images out and i am now experimenting in my sketchbook on how to fit these images together. I will scan in my results.

Here are the scans of my experiments in my sketchbook:

I am really pleased with these but still have a lot further to go with this idea. One problem is that i have been doing all the cutting and consturcting by hand and on paper although when i come to submit my final images i want them to be digital so i need to take some time experimenting on Photoshop and to see whether i can produce these images digitally aswell and manually.

Doug Aitken

I really like Doug Aitken’s work where he takes four images of a landscape and makes them into a pyramid like shape, for example you can see below...

I thought to link this to the city I could take images of city landscapes and put them into the shape; I think it would look really effective with all the different size and length buildings making an uneven outer edge.

When experimenting with this concept i really struggled as i was using my Nikon D3100 DSLR so my view finder and screen were rectangluar and not square format. Therefore it was really hard to get the compostion correct.

City Lights

When looking at Naoya Hatakeyama's work of the reflections of the city lights on water i thought about capturing the city lights in movement as the movement represents the buzz and livelyness of the city.

When researching into this more i found a few photographers who focus on light movement in the city and one which inspired me greatly is Kristopher Grunert. He focuses on photographing the movement of lights within the city. He was intrigued by the concrete city scapes encased in saturated tones of street lights. Grunert uses a 1972 Hassleblad and long exposures of 10-20 seconds

I tried out some light movement images for myself when out and about in manchester when it had gone dark,

I used 10 sec f/11 for all the shots seen below...

5 sec f/11

15 sec f/11

Disposable camera images scanned in...

While out on the urban walk i thought i would take some images with a dispoable camera so that i had a different type of image rather than just digital. i have scanned in these images so that i can edit and manipulate them. i will be putting the original printed images in my visual diary.

Here are my favourites (unedited)...

Research

When looking at Susan Brights book 'Art Photography Now' i found a section called 'The City', in this section i found two photographers work which i really liked, Richard Wentworth and Naoya Hatakeyama, i also found a photographer in the book which did not do city photography but his work inspired me to do some city photographs in his style.

 I feel really inspired by the composition of Doug Aitken's work, the way he uses the landscape to create these pyramid like images is amazing and i think it would work really well with city landscapes, with all the different heights of the buildings. I am going to research more into Doug's work and see what i can find.

Urban Walk

Today we went on an 'Urban Walk', this was to introduce us to the way Psychogeographers work and i really enjoyed it, i felt instead of walking around noticing all the big buildings and attractive shop fronts i zoomed in and looked closer to the more unplaced objects that you would not notice unless you were looking for them.

Here are a few snaps from today (unedited)...

Edited versions of the images above...



I plan to do another of these 'urban walks' without university so that i can stop and ponder for longer when i see something that catches my eye rather than looking up and being miles behind everybody. I feel i need to take time to look deeper into the city and photograph every little detail that interests me.

At this moment in time i am really interested in the street names and signs within the city, i feel they show personality not only by the name but the ware and tare of the sign and where it is postioned on buildings etc.