Assignment 3. Tutor Feedback

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Original Reflection

I hope my selection feels like a coherent set, as they were all taken within the woods and have a feeling of nature throughout. I wanted to use the theme of our permitted daily exercise to also create that feeling. I tried to ensure all photos had greenery within them. I had originally picked a couple of different photos for my final set, however, I thought there were too many of people and they all looked pretty similar. I then went to take more photos over a few more days to get a better final set.

From my research, I was really taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s approach. I loved that he could take one shot and that would be it. When I submitted my “one square mile” assignment, a comment from my tutor was that he liked that I hadn’t taken the same frame over and over, I just took it and moved on. Perhaps that’s something I’ve moved away from whilst moving through this course, by trying to find the ‘perfect’ photo. Also after submitting ‘one square mile’ my tutor recommended I go out more than once to take photos rather than expecting to find everything in one take. I definitely found with this assignment that shooting in the same place over and over gave me so many more opportunities. I am glad I took the time day by day to have another go. Overall that let me have more images to choose from and made each walk more worthwhile knowing something different could come along. I took a few of the different routes through the woods so I had more chance of seeing something different. (My ‘One square mile’ can be found here).

While trying to get the photos for this assignment, I’ve found that I’ve had to take more than one shot to get the ‘decisive moment’. I don’t think this is the right assignment to take the one shot. Snapping something and seeing that each frame is different gives a lot of choice when looking through possible photos to submit. However, to capture the decisive moment, I felt it necessary to take multiple shots to see how the person/animal moved over that short period of time. Allowing me to capture the movement and pick the best frame.

When first shooting for this assignment, I also learnt an important lesson. When you’ve taken a photo, look back at it on the camera to check your settings are correct. Maybe do a ‘test shot’ in new light. I found that I looked through the viewfinder to take what I thought looked like a great shot, only to find out when I had walked away that the shutter speed was too fast and there was not enough light let in. Therefore the photo wasn’t usable like I’d thought, without editing the brightness afterwards. This led to me using a slower shutter speed to ensure more light was able to be captured.

I think again with this assignment, I spend too long second guessing myself. I am a serious over thinker and that makes me procrastinate with starting the physical “go out and take photos” part of the exercises and assignments. Because I over think what’s being asked of me, I spend a long time thinking about what I can do, until I think “that’s it” and decide what I’m going to do. From this, I think I need to use those thoughts as part of my learning log. At the moment, I go round and round but I my in my own head. Perhaps putting some of the thoughts on paper would make my decision making easier and inspire something different. It would also show my thought process as to how I get to what I do. I think this assignment has helped me to perhaps change my approach and I feel more prepared when going out now.

For images 5. ‘Pigeon Flying Off’ and image 7. ‘Squirrel Spotting the Camera’, I slightly adjusted the brightness to allow them to work as part of the set. I didn’t feel they looked right as they were darker than the rest. Image 4. ‘Squirrel Scratching’ was taken in landscape. I wanted to use this as part of my final set, but felt it would work better if all of my images were either landscape or portrait. Therefore, I cropped this one. I used Snapseed on iPad to do this.

The good I have taken from this assignment, is going out prepared to take photos. I have often looked at something and thought it was a good photo opportunity, but missed it because I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t considered that I needed to change my approach before. However, since starting this assignment, I’ve found myself getting to my destination and straight away getting my camera out ready. This was down to my research on HCB. As I said, he was described as always being ready, I think that’s really important now, looking back on the amount of times I have missed something. Even at the start of shooting for this, I thought I could get my camera when I saw something, but by then it’s often too late.

When starting part three, I really struggled to find the motivation to do it. I’ve always thought of shutter speed as being the hardest technique to learn. However, I’ve enjoyed learning this new skill. I feel quite confident in this mode now, although I wouldn’t say I know it well enough to get it right every time yet. However, it does give me more confidence to move in to manual mode for part four. I haven’t shot in manual really since buying my camera. I did have a play at first but couldn’t get the right results, hopefully this will change now I’ve worked through Auto, AV & TV. Shutter priority is now a mode I feel I could use fairly confidently in the future and will look forward to doing so. With some practice I could capture better photographs.

Thoughts Following Tutor Feedback

When first seeing the feedback for assignment 3, I was a little concerned about my work being described as having a “childlike simplicity” to it. To me this felt as though childlike was meant in a way that a child could have done it? However, when going in to the full report, I no longer felt it was a negative when reading “I like most of all the childhood simplicity you’ve acheived”.

I’m pleased my work has achieved the decisive moment, and therefore fit the brief. I’m also very pleased to see my reflective writing is described as “highly developed”. I really tried to make my reflective writing one of my main focus’s this time, as I dont feel I’ve done it particularly well previously and wanted to use this assignment to better this skill.

Understandably, part of my feedback to improve on going forward, is creativity. I felt very pushed for time to get this assignment submitted as I’d already taken such a long break from my work whilst pregnant and in the first weeks of babies life. I knew when submitting my work that, although I was pleased with the final photos, I hadn’t pushed myself. As I said in my reflection, I have always seen shutter speed as the hardest part to master. This made this assignment scary to me. For that reason, I was just glad to produce a set of images that were not blurry. Perhaps that’s why I did not go down the route of capturing motion, and instead froze it? Perhaps that is why it isn’t so creative? I was too set on getting the right shutter speed to freeze the moments, that I forgot to enjoy it and ‘create’ moments.

Having said that, I really did enjoy the work of HCB and that influenced how I took my photos. I loved that he just captured what he saw as he saw it. no setting up of photographs, no pretend scenes.

My main feedback to work on next time is to link my research more explicitly, and to be more adventurous. Hopefully I can take both on board and move forward with them when producing the next assignment!

Tutor feedback, Robert Bloomfield, 10/08/20.

Reflection Writing

In my learning log, I wrote about the importance of reflective writing and what it means to me after finding an article on the OCA forum. My original write up can be found here. I found the article really useful in helping me to understand the importance of writing reflectively and how that can help my progress going forward. My notes on reflective writing are now in my notebook, which I always have with me whilst putting my work online.