Tutor feedback Assignment 3:Colours

January 2013
I was please to receive constructive and positive comments for this assignment. I became a bit lost in the colour exercises work and had to focus hard to bring it all back together.

“Once again an interesting range of work has been completed here, with some images working better than others. On the whole it was a very strong submission though Nicola.”

Follow up work from assignment 2 had been to look at work from Parr, Eggleston and Shore. Because the colours of Shore’s work really stood out to me, I was able to think about desaturating one of my images.

I thought a beneficial point made was to try and make my viewpoint stand out including commenting on why certain photographers have chosen to work in such a way, whether I think it works well or not and how my work relates to this. So when desaturating an image, I should have related it back to the first colour photographers and the advantages I have in that I can choose whether I desaturate an image because I think it looks more visually appealing to me.(April 2103 I have tried to do this in subsequent assignments.)  

Assignment Feedback
My tutor thought that “this was a really impressive assignment submission Nicola, which was very methodically and comprehensively compiled.” My tutor thought my observation of the imagery used and attention to set detail worked. The accompanying sketches supported the photograph and I had included detail to help me learn from the exercise as much as anything.

Learning Logs/Critical essays

• Include in my text my own thoughts and opinions about the work I am researching and how this relates to my work. The turning point for my being able to express my thoughts more fluently was after I visited an exhibition where there was nothing written about the photographer or photograph. It was difficult to understand some works and an explanation would have been helpful. I started to think much more about how I communicate what is in my head.
• Use of navigation to sort out my blog. I looked at other students blogs to see what I liked and how I could make it work using Blogger. I added 3 pages to  it – test shots, photographic exhibitions and my reading list. By adding labels to all my posts it made it much easier for me to navigate and meant that I could post pages in the order I completed the exercises rather than chronologically.

 Suggested reading/viewing

• Penn, I.2001:Still Life. London. Thames & Hudson. ISBN-13: 978-0500542484
• Weston, E.1999: Edward Weston (Photographic Study). London. Taschen ISBN-13: 978-3822871805
• Knight, N.2004: Flora. Schirmer / Mosel Verlag GM ISBN-13: 978-3888149146

 Follow Up Work

• Look at the above works

I read reviews for Weston and Knight. I liked the look of the photographs in Knights book because they were different. The only downside is that the book is written in German, but the patterns he used were thought provoking.  I had previously bought a book on Weston and Knight’s inspired me so I added this to my collection of books. I researched Penn on the internet as his books were out of print.