Exercise: Rain Magazine Cover

The exercise on p181 is to create a magazine cover on the subject of rain. Here is mine:

I did take this other image at the same time but I think the one I chose it better. Rainy london.

Exercise: Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is all about putting objects together to suggest a relationship and its the mainstay of illustration. In this exercise we are encouraged to take a book and create a new cover for it by taking relevant elements of the story and incorporating those together.

I recently read a very silly book called Undead & Unwed. It’s a comedy about a completely handbag & shoe preoccupied young woman called Betsy who gets killed and wakes up, not only undead, but queen of the vampires because for some reason she can walk in the sun. Pride and Prejudice for the new generation? Not. But funny nevertheless. Here is my new cover for it…

I choose fake (glow in the dark) fangs (to indicate comedy and vampire), OTT handbag and clearly fake blood. The real cover looks like this where they use ditzy blond doing her make up sitting on a gravestone:

Exercise: Symbols

Following on from yesterdays exercise, this next one (on p178) is more of a thought exercise than a practical one. The idea is to find symbols for a number of supplied concepts here are mine:

• Growth – eggs, small green shoots, little & large comparisons, children wearing adults cloths & shoes, increasing line graph, seeds, babies
• Excess – sex, drugs & rock & roll lifestyles, banquets, super drunk people, obesity, exaggerated bling
• Crime – guns, knives, handcuffs, police badges, mugshots, bloody bodies, chalk outlines, hoodies, balaclavas, swag, being arrested
• Silence – silencers, headphones, praying, libraries, one finger to lips hush sign
• Poverty – open hand (begging), 3rd world aid, tramps, people rummaging through bins, soup (kitchen), two cents (have not got two to rub together), the big issue.

Exercise: Evidence of Action

The exercise on p177 is a challenge to produce one photo in which it can be seen that something has happened. Suggestions included something that might have been broken or emptied. Here I went for something spilled.

The project associated with this action is all about illustration, and about how it really comes into its own when the subject is dealing with an abstract idea or concept. I wanted to illustrate the saying “No point crying over split milk”, which is another way of saying accidents happen, or what’s in the past is done and you have to suck it up and deal with the situation. I was going to use real milk but I had the idea to use milk illustration (cut out paper) as stand in. It illustrated my point better using the graphical concept of spilt milk.

The example of illustrating an idea that is given in the exercise is when insurance companies need to advertise. The second part of the exercise was to think of 5 examples of concepts that are regularly depicted in advertising & publicity:

• Love – advertisers are continually trying to sell using love
• Wealth – advertisers know that many people want to be rich
• Faith – all sorts of symbols for this across the different faiths
• Popularity – advertsiers play with popularity, who’s hot or not, the facebook ‘like’ thumbs up, etc
• spread bettering – the best one I saw for this was a patched teddybear with a slogan about being stuffed, it made me laugh because many people get caught out spread betting so a company that can help you reap the rewards without so much risk would be worth it.
• Virus protection – this is a bit like insurance, where they tend to use shields etc as symbols for protection.

There are many photographers who specialise in conceptual photograph, the one who springs to my mind is David Nitsche

Exercise: A Narrative Picture Essay

The narrative picture essay is a series of images which tell a story. We are all so used to trying to tell a story with one image sometimes we forget that a photo essay might be a more appropriate vehicle for telling the full story. I often do this on my personal blog when I come home from a trip (e.g. Whalesharks in Mexico). If there has been several discreet ‘chapters’ to my the story of my trip I might split them up into several blog posts and over the breadth of the trip across those (for example here, with my Namibia trip).

Image placement ,size and spacing becomes important in a picture essay. The images work differently when placed next to other images than in a standalone post. You can use size and order to emphasise certain aspects and shape the story. Captions are integral to most photo essays, linking the photos together to weave the story and give you greater insight to what is going on. The layout would be different depending on where & how the essay is to be displayed. I construct my blogs around my images but I try and shot my images to be standalone images for the most part. When you shoot for a story you find yourself taking context & linking shots which otherwise you might not take (or if you take them you might not normally choose to display them), but in the context of the story they can become the glue that hold the stand alone images together.

 

I actually went out into the Red Sea with the express intention of creating a photobook of my trip (for Solo photo book month). I had been to the Red Sea before, on the same boats in fact. So I knew what to expect. The types of shots to prepare for and most importantly I knew I wanted a photo book at the end of it. I found myself planning out the main story and then shooting to it rather than just my usual ‘street’ photography style of shoot what is interesting at the time. It was quite a challenge, the aim is to create 35 photos (or more) and text (if you want to) and put them in a PDF photobook all within 31 days! Also, because I’d planned it upfront, I was able to quiz my boat-mates throughout the week for some quotes on what they thought of the Red Sea to appear in my book.

The SoFoBoMo site (which has closed down now) had a size restriction on the file so I didn’t bother trying to print it because it’d look very crap. It’s been optimised for screen viewing and compressed to within an inch of its life to get it down to under 7mb. I was on a PC when I edited (not my Mac) so I used Microsoft publisher to layout which was pretty easy to use. I published to pdf but there wasn’t really any options on the pdf (security or document properties or anything) so I downloaded a free trial version of Adobe Acrobat 9 to edit my pdf properties. It was a very enjoyable process.

Here is my eBook.