A1—Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

• I am, for the most part, happy with the results I achieved for A1. I think that there is still room for improvement in the composition of some of the images, however. My main concern was that there would be enough pedestrian traffic in the frame to provide the desired blurring effect during the time the shutter was open. Next time, I will also pay more attention to the background of the images.
• Even with a 10-stop filter, I found that exposure times could be shorter than what I was after, depending upon how bright the sun was. A uniform set of overcast days would have been ideal. I could have had much longer exposure times at night, obviously, but I did not want the assignment to become a ‘night photography’ exercise where ambient lights and colours might distract from the desired effect on the pedestrians.
• The 10-stop filter also created some challenges around the white balance of the RAW images. Although the filter was not cheap and was fairly neutral in terms of colour cast, it was not perfect. I matched the colour balances of the individual long- and short-exposures as best I could, but it is not perfect. If I use this technique again, there are probably a few things I could do: post-produce the final images in black and white (perhaps this is why Titarenko opted for monochrome); take more time with colour balancing in my editing software; and/or do additional test shots of each scene with a grey card to help ensure accurate colour rendition.

Quality of outcome

• I had a good idea of the effect that I wanted to achieve before I began shooting and, for the most part, achieved it.
• I am happy with my conceptual approach and believe that I have expressed it effectively, both visually and in my documentation on the blog.
• If I print these images for display, I think I might do so as a more obvious set of diptychs: not just side-by-side as a series of images with similar backgrounds, but as a set of diptychs with two pictures printed on a single sheet of photographic paper.

Demonstration of creativity

• It is always tricky to speak of one’s own demonstration of creativity, but I think that I brought a slightly new twist to the brief of ‘two sides of the story.’ From my scan of other OCA student blogs, it appears that many achieve their ‘two sides’ by changing the camera’s viewpoint or by altering the subject matter from frame to frame. I decided to play with the dimension of time without altering the viewpoint or subject matter and I think it has been effective.
• If it is any indication of my satisfaction with the results—not complete satisfaction, but pleased enough—I think that I would like to return to this approach again where appropriate for later work, whether for the OCA or for myself. I wouldn’t simply repeat what I have done here, but try to improve my technique (see above) and push the concepts further. There is still more for me to do with the effects of time and our perceptions of it.

Context

• As I discussed with my tutor when I began CAN, I already had a rough idea of the approach I wanted to take with A1. My research, particularly of Titarenko’s work helped to focus the visual approach to my work: I could see that limiting the exposures to a few seconds created more interesting images than my original idea of having people disappear entirely through extremely long exposures. I did try this for some of my earlier attempts and thought that the results were a bit boring and could possibly confuse viewers (“Were people really there, or are you playing games with us?”).
• The discussions by Rutherford and Campany were also helpful to me in terms of better communicating the original concept I had in mind and setting it within an ongoing discourse about the ‘reliability’ of still photographic images and their impact upon our perception of time and truth.