I was very pleasantly surprised with my tutor’s feedback on assignment 2. I had beaten myself up about the technical problems I experienced; surely, I should have made sure I understood my camera’s settings better than I did. I was also disappointed with the quality of the resulting photographs. When submitting my work to my tutor, I had pre-empted his response by saying that I knew I would have to re-do this project but felt I needed to draw a line under it for now and get some feedback. His reply was that it was a ‘great project and showed a lot of work’!
Overall comments
This submission online has depth and crosses a number of creative and conceptual areas of focus. Each exercise explores connections between assigned tasks and the ways in which your own research can activate new ways of planning and executing photographic work. Making use of mapping software alongside more traditional ways of thinking of a journey shows that your able to choose and apply a methodology to suite whilst offering new openings and ways of creating work.
Feedback on assignment
Your explanation of technical exposure issues was useful and given the space in which you were working it seems that you managed to overcome some of these. I didn’t feel as though I had overcome them sufficiently well though and this resulted in what I felt were poor quality images.
My tutor suggested I reset my camera to manual and systematically work though each setting to the more complex shooting modes. I have actually done that and have discovered that I miss interpreted the information in the manual about exposure settings. what I thought was ‘spot metering’ was in fact ‘central weighted metering’. I also think I over complicated the task by giving myself too many things to keep track of.
What is useful and significant is your ability, whilst on location, to recognise and respond to events. Although I did this, I did not feel I had done it very well. He goes on to acknowledge that the research I had undertaken, for example, Rolf Sachs, had given me a framework for my project which had resulted in being able to translate my journey into a visual sequence. Although I was unhappy with the quality of the final images, I was pleased with the process I had gone through and that I had managed to produce a project with represented my experience of the journey. Whilst my tutor points out that I could undertake further processing of the images, they may be better left if I want to keep a sense of primacy. I’m not sure that I want to undertake any further processing to those images but I may well decide to re-shoot the journey again with a slightly simpler set of rules.
Coursework
Coursework is thorough, exercises show ability to reflect on previous work, ‘shifting focus from previously learned workand re applying to new work shows that learning is fully taking hold’ It seems to have taken me a while to get to this point but I do feel that I am more and more able to draw on learning from earlier courses and re-apply it. I also think that what I have learned from other students through the South West group has been really beneficial.
Research
My tutor felt that my learning log was perceptive and that the artist and photographers I chose enabled me to connect with very different practices. One comment he made which I will explore further referenced my initial inspiration for this project which was a GWR advertisement showing Enid Blyton’s famous 5 going on a train journey.
‘It would be worth exploring the connectivity between the GWR advertising board – the recreating of a bygone age, the visual language it employs and the use of typography with that of Ed Ruscha perhaps. Through much of your work one can see that the thread of such connections is very present. Connecting the promise of a journey and the actual might be worth exploring further. This might be something that could reaper as the module progresses.’
I haven’t actually though of this before but the nostalgic picture portrayed in the GWR poster and the reality of the actual journey are quite different and my tutor’s suggestion that this might be something to consider later in the module gives me food for thought. I have just viewed a short YouTube video where Fay Godwin revisits some of the sites she included in her Land book and was horrified at the changes that had taken place.
My tutor liked the range of activities reflected on in my learning log and recognises my drive to explore more and different kinds of experience.
Suggestions for further reading/viewing
- https://fonts.barnbrook.net/
- https://www.adbusters.org/
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/being-ecological-timothy-morton-review
Anne's Landscape Learning Log 