Music Gets Me Through It.

Following on from the initial ideas for my still life shoot, I thought about including some songs that have helped get me through emotional times and given me inspiration:

Madina Lake - Friends & Lovers

The chorus in Madina Lake's "Friends & Lovers" has helped me through past troubles by reminding me that no matter what happens, i'll still always have myself.
The lyrics are:
"You can build a life and have it broken down.
You can chose a path and get turned around.
You can hate yourself and fall in love again.
As for me, I've lost friends lost lovers.
But I still got my soul."

My Chemical Romance - Famous Last Words

This emotional powerhouse is for me the ultimate "get on with your life and forget about the past" song. The song is filled with thrashing guitars, screaming vocals and the build up of tension before the first chorus really adds to the overall emotive feel to the song.
The lyrics are:
"I am not afraid to keep on living,
I am not afraid to walk this world alone
Honey, if you stay I'll be forgiven
Nothing you can say can stop me going home."

Motion City Soundtrack - Worker Bee

This song is a favourite of mine because of the explosive start and feel good, confident attitude that you get after a while of recovering from heartbreak. It's a song that for me, expresses moving on in it's entirety and finally being able to progress in your life after a failed relationship.
The Lyrics are:
"It's been a good year, a good new beginning,
I'm through with the old school so let's commence the winning,
I've been a good little worker bee,
I deserve a gold star."


These are but three of many songs I listen too that all fall within the Rock genre that have helped me get through previous bad experiences and I like to think they have greatly influenced me as a person in many ways.

Why I love Large Format.

Whilst I was in the darkroom printing out my first medium format photographs, I thought to myself:
"Why not print that large format negative while i'm here?"

So I did. and boy I'm glad I did. The detail is ridiculous! I just wish I had a decent scanner... oh well, better get saving...

Who Needs Digital?

Analogue FTW! (At least it is so far...)

My first B&W medium format contact sheet ^^

During the first month of this course I have learnt a great deal about using analogue film to take photographs instead of digital, and I can honestly say so far I absolutely love it! (I might not even go back to digital for a few years...)

The whole process of creating a negative, then processing this in the darkroom, and projecting the results onto photographic paper to create a latent image ready for printing is a real joy to do.

My favourite part of this process is the printing stage for black and white negatives, using various filter grades and exposure times to enhance the print really allows you to make the image your own and get the final print exactly right.

The pictures above show (albeit not very clearly - I took them on my iPad you see) the process and evolution of a print in order to reach the final image, I started off by creating test strips, the first of which featured test exposures of grade 2 at intervals of 5 seconds in order for me to decide which was the roughly correct exposure. Moving on from this I printed a full test strip of that exposure to get a closer look at both the highlights and shadows of the image. I found that the print was a tad overexposed and there was slightly too much contrast.

To counter the blown highlights, moving more of the exposure towards a lower grade filter to give them more time to imprint onto the photographic paper, whilst leaving a smaller exposure time for the grade 2 exposure.

I also found that the print suffered slightly because the shadows were slightly too light also, so to solve this problem I added a short, 5 second exposure with the grade 5 filter in place, this would give the blacks a much darker look, without compromising the rest of the image too badly.

I played around with the grades and exposure times a few times in order to achieve what I thought was the best possible print, a print which was pretty much ruined by the quality of my scanner:

Final Print, ignore the watermark, Lightroom exports all my pictures with one.

Object & Body Initial Ideas

Alright let's do this.

Unit 1: The Object & The Body. Split into two halves, each half is pretty much self explanatory. This could be an interesting one...

So for the first part of this unit I need to "develop a concept, plan, organise, construct and photograph a still life of my own using colour film and a large format camera."

Okay;
1. Film scares me.
2. Large Format scares me.
3. The very thought of Still Life scares me.

I suppose it could be worse. At least I get to choose the topic of subject matter and all that stuff, speaking of which, this should be something related to me, like a subject of some local discussion or something in my life.

Upon receiving this brief my mind initially wandered to over the the concept of travel. With my daily commute being quite a long one to university, and having quite a big impact on my life for the next three years I thought that it could be something I could "make a comment upon." Then I realised how bloody boring it is and that there is a distinct lack of actual objects that I could use to make a decent still life.

Idea scrapped, let's go back and look at my past. I, like a large number of other typical blonde, 18 year old, milk-loving photography students, have been through my fair share of emotional turmoil over the years. Love and loss, fear and loathing are some of the feelings I've felt quite a lot in the past few months and they haven't seemed to be stopping.

I've been heartbroken. And I'm not afraid to admit it, on many occasions too. (And mum if you're reading this, yes it's true, I couldn't  really tell you this stuff because I'm just a bloke really - soz bout that) This, and I'll put it bluntly, horrible feeling really does push you to edge of your sanity, it challenges your personality and actually changes you as a person. It eats away at your soul, forcing you each time to realise: "That's it, I've got to start all over again." It's really not the nicest thing. During the initial stages of heartbreak I've felt angry, lonely, isolated, insecure, paranoid and a multitude of other emotions, but none as strong as depression.

Depression is quite a big thing in modern day teenage society, with stress being one on the more common causes. In its mildest form, depression can mean just being in low spirits. It doesn’t stop you leading your normal life, but makes everything harder to do and seem less worthwhile. At its most severe, major depression can be life-threatening, because it can make people suicidal or simply give up the will to live.

I wanted to base my first area of work in this topic because it means something to me. I've been depressed on more than one occasion and often found it difficult to cope with or find help. Luckily now though I think I've found a point in my own life where I'm rather happy and able to talk about my past.

But for other teenagers this is not the case, many young people feel so lost and "stuck in a rut" that they feel the need to self harm or even commit suicide in order to end the seemingly hellish world they live in.

Summer Project: Still Life Self Portrait

You see that ^^

That's me. Or... well as close to me as you can get without actually having a picture of my ugly mug on screen. This is the place where I spend the large majority of my time. If I'm not here them i'm probably out shouting at traffic, or on the moon.

Right, well... What can I say about this picture? There's my iMac, iPad & iPhone in there, I'm a bit of an Apple fan boy to be honest. I love my music, so I've got a pair of decent speakers and you can't really see it, but underneath on the pull-out drawer I have my graphics tablet, because sometimes I like to do a little bit of photoshop drawing. :) There's the arty side of me right there...

On my desk I have a couple of little "mementos" including a little chuck of glass I was bought on a little romantic trip to Paris - yup, I like to travel. There's of course Lee which, if you read my last blog post, is explained. Also you can see card readers, a pen cup, some Blutac and an old laptop I'm hoping to Hackintosh some day...

I've got various prints of my work on the wall that I actually nicked from my portfolio - the print quality was so good that I thought leaving them in a folder would just be a plain waste. What good is a picture that you can't see?

Also stuck on the wall next to my light switch is my (Almost) complete collection of gig tickets. I do love me a good rock show and I say almost because at my first gig I accidentally threw the ticket away, not thinking that I could get a collection together :(

Stuck right next to these I have a couple of bit's of commercial work - I shot a wedding, and the disk is up there should I ever need another copy for something, and I also have a good copy of a brochure I took pictures for. It's a simple leaflet for the swimming pool I work for so nothing special, but my job is important to me so it's included.

What's up with the computer screen I hear you ask? Well look at it, it's transparent... I'm not going to tell you how I did it, because that would be cheating but here's a hint - I did use a bit of photoshop in this picture :)

So yeah, that's my desk, or should I say me - in object form. Thanks for reading, I hope I didn't bore you too much...