London 24th April 2014

This was my first time to ever to London! 

And I really enjoyed it. It was nice to be there after so long of wanting to go, I loved the galleries that we managed to get to and the fact that there was so so much to see.

The first place we went was the Tate Modern....

One problem that I always find in galleries is trying not to catch my reflection in photo frames or sculptures that are reflective, but after getting a decent photo of this sculptures I then played around with the small square mirrors and my stripped trousers.

For this piece there was a square around the outside that said do no cross but it was at such a distance you could not see what was inside the box (unless you were really tall) which I thought was a pretty interesting concept. So rather than not knowing the 'mystery' of what was inside the box I held my camera high and took a photo of the inside.

In one of Eva's lectures we were looking at people who use other's work as their own by altering them, like layering a set of photos on top of one another and creating a new images. When I saw these sculptures I thought that I could do something similar by just taking an angled shot to make an 'abstract' photo....

.....Although I didn't really plan on doing this properly, these two photos are just quick examples of what I could of done, maybe layering the images over each other and seriously changing the contrast and making them black and white would be a perfect way of using existing work and making something new.....

This painting reminded me of Mark Rothko...its may look like a simple and easy
painting but to get the lines the exact same would of very difficult to do.

After leaving the gallery we went for a walk around London and came across Ben Wilson, better known as the Chewing Gum Man. He paints on gum that has been spat on the ground, once it has been stood on enough and is no longer sticky he paints on them creating little pieces of art.

A few weeks previous to going to London a friend had asked if I had been and had any London photos, after telling her that I didn't but I was going, she proceeded to tell me that she was setting up a Polish/English translation business and needed some 'English/London' photos to advertise so by going to London this gave me the chance to help her out.

Esther Teichmann Artist Talk

I had never seen Esther Teichmann's work before, but after she showed us what she has done and told us about the projects that she wants to do I found myself really loving her work. I mainly loved her videos which at the time she said she had not released yet and after trying to find them online I guess she still has not released them yet. The video that I really loved was of a woman who was a dancer rolling around naked on a bed that had curtains on it, her movements and the enclosed bed were to represent the womb. The video went on for quiet while and had no sound (I think it was unedited) but the movements of the woman flowed so naturally and some of her movement were really flexible and unusual she did appear to be floating around in water. This video may have been to do with a project she had done called Mother and Lover, but I am not 100% sure of this.

I love every aspect of this photo, I love the really unusual, kind of not right vignette effect on the photo. It brings focus to a specific area in the photo and kind of looks and if the colour in that circle has in fact been washed away slightly. This photos bring to mind so many questions about the person in the photo, like why are they there, are they okay, are they safe and so on....

Like in a previous artist talk I tried to take away as much information I could from her about the industry and how to succeed and do well. She told us about how she had collaborated with a painter, so when I got back to halls I asked an artist and a illustrator if at some point they would want to do a collaboration together, both said yes. I had never thought about collaborations before but I think it is a good way of getting your name out there, a good way to meet new people in different areas of art which could then get you into different areas in art.

She told us that in her sketchbooks she tends to write down little stories and will based her work off them. This really appealed to me because this is something I like doing, I like creating my own little world and getting lost in it, but again I have never thought about combining it with my photography. For my current project I am looking into stories and escapism so this was the perfect time to be shown that using any element in your life can contribute to your photographic work. I am defiantly going to Use Esther as artist research in my visual diary. 

To me this photo is quite a fantasy style photo, the colours in the trees don't seem right, it looks as if the man is setting on some sort of random adventure into the forest, yet again bringing around a lot of questions of why. I think the paint running off the frame of the photo adds to the fantasy idea and the fact that she writes stories with her work already shows this combination of her fantasy mixing in and becoming involved with her reality, the paint is running from the world in the photo and bleeding into reality.

Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist who has become notorious through his photos of corpses and his use of feces and bodily fluids in his work, notably his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine.- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Serrano

This is a photo that at I first glance I would like a lot, I think the colours of the photo are really nice, the textures across the image make the photos seem more than just a photo where the light has been edited, it give it more depth. But even while writing I feel uncomfortable saying that I like the photo because it is a photo of urine.

7 Simple Photography Hacks

I came across this video while looking at articles on http://fstoppers.com/. I love videos like this because there are no long winded explanations, simple little tricks to try out and each different hack only takes up a few seconds.

I think some of the hacks could be quite useful like the string tripod.... it's so much less space than a tripod and you can carry around the right amount of string in your camera bag so you can always have something to steady yourself.

I though the Vaseline hack was brilliant! Rather than adding in blurred effects afterwards you can just carry a pocket size tub of Vaseline, like you might anyway, and just slip a filter into the camera bag and you have a brilliant photo effect at hand with little fuss.

Trying out the hacks.....

The first one that I tried out was the Vaseline hack, I don't have a filter but I though I would try it with cling film, that way you don't have to spend a while trying to clean the filter because you can just throw away the cling film afterwards.

Cling filmed camera with a hair bobble holding the cling film in place.

Vaseline....

I wanted to make sure that even thought there was something over the camera lens the image would still be clear, when I took the image on the right it was slight misty so I tightened the cling film as much as I could and wiped it slightly and tried again.







Maybe it was the sunlight from the blind behind but when I took the photo on the left I found the image much clearer and knew that using cling film rather than a lens would be okay to do.

This is my before photo of my subject before I put Vaseline on...

This was the first photo that I took with the Vaseline one and I think it was the best, there isn't too much blur, the rabbit is framed well and overall its not a bad photo.

The rest of the photos are just me carrying on practising with the Vaseline, I think I would be able to use this as a technique in my photos at some point, I think in certain themed photos this technique would be really good but it is just getting used to how much blur you want in the photo and getting your subject framed properly. 

I don't really like this photo but I like the effect that the Vaseline has on the cats right ear.
I like the look of it fading/ being blurred away.

I used blue and purple pen to colour the cling film and then ripped it like in the video, yet again attaching it to the camera with a band.

Although these photos did not turn out how I wanted them or thought they would I still like the effect that the cling film has given, I think I will have the practice a lot more with this technique in order to get it to work properly. Maybe I didn't use bold enough colours on the cling film? It has a vignette effect like the Vaseline but not a smooth, this kind of looks like broken glass....or maybe just plastic....

One overall problem I found using the cling film was  that if I had too much excess, when the wind blew it would get into the shot so I had to hold it down, but to prevent that I would just have to cut off the excess and it would be fine. 

The next time that I test these methods I will use a person as my subject, the animals were difficult to work with and it was hard trying to get them to stand still while I changed the focus and moved the cling film out of shot.