Catching what doesn't exist

Well, folks. One last push. Tomorrow is the date of my final assessment, so naturally I'm scrabbling like an idiot to get everything done in time. Because, you know, I didn't burn out from my last two assessments or anything.

(That was a lie. I've been pretty useless the last 18 hours.)

So I guess that this is the final comment on acutal uni work on the blog for this semester. Shall we do it?

This is the concept for my other Photography subject, Light. My other, 3000-level, third-year elective. (Brooke is an idiot.)

The theme for this project was Fabrication.


Because Light was all about using light (in its many forms) to fabricate a composition. Funny that. Anyway. I really can't remember where exactly this started to crystallise into something solid.

I guess it was when I started breaking down the concept of Fabrication by writing things and sticking them to my wardrobe doors. I love this wardrobe. Not just because it's a giant IKEA monstrosity that I built when I was sixteen, but because it's really good for spatial thinking, and for taking photos against.

That aside. Somehow I arrived at an interesting conclusion. Depict and create a recurring character on film.

The character in question I refer to as the Girl in the Blue Dress. She doesn't have a name. I don't want to give her one either - I've named too many separate pieces of personality, anyway.

But this one; she is odd. She doesn't exist properly; always outside of the action and the noise. Unable to speak or touch. Removed from reality but for one thin point of contact, and she's always wanted in, but can't. She's made out of the wrong stuff.

Admittedly, that 'wrong stuff' allows her to float around, and blend, and interact with the world like a whisper. Busy looking cool and slightly frustrated by the alienation.

I draw her a lot. That's how I know her. And she's probably my most successful fabrication. Moreso than Beech, or Rowan or Joey or Kara or Aeon or Caspian or Xander (who are all characters in stories I've written over the last ten years or so). I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I didn't give her a name. It's allowed her to keep growing because she's not defined by it.

And then I was going to try and take photos of something that didn't exist, with a device that is designed to pin down reality. The indexical qualities that we give the photograph means that even when we know it was 'shopped, there was something that this was taken from that existed first.

It's an odd concept, but it's also something that's almost exclusive to the realm of photo and video. It's much more difficult to alter a photo than a picture or a painting. Not in a technical sense, but there's a bit in your head that still goes 'this is a part of that person'.

Weird.

So, camera dictates that the photo has to have stemmed from life, somewhere. Photo also dictates that something has to be there to create the subject matter.

Because explaining Girl in the Blue Dress to people was a bit difficult while I was working in the classroom, I had to simplify it a bit.

"It's about the things you invent in the back of your head that don't exist properly"

Well, sort of. The manifestation that we got to see through my project was just her.


There were two parts to how the project was executed.

The first was in camera (and I work with film because I enjoy a nice simple life).
Because I wanted to take photos of something that didn't exist, or at least didn't exist properly, the project got pushed in the way of ghost photography and long exposures. I would leave the shutter open for a while and let light and the girl walk across the film before closing it and advancing the film. The results always varied from horribly overexposed to difficult compositions. Good photos were few and far between. It wasn't until I was almost finished that I had another tutor talk to me about how the photos were taken.

"So you're taking all of these in camera?"

"Yeah."

"On 35mm film?"

"Yeah."

"That's actually really difficult,"

"I know."

Oh. For those who aren't familiar and have not gotten info from context. In Camera means that the composition or special effect was applied when the photo was taken. There was no post-production work done to get the effect.

(Which is still possible in a film camera. If you don't believe me check out Jerry Uelsmann. The guy is a nut and a genius.)

Manual Photoshop.

Having the subject move around in camera was good, because I got these blurry half-defined images of something which definitely didn't exist on the same plane as everything else.

And then, in Silver, we learned how to tone images by dunking them in more chemicals. Some of which were very smelly. But that was how I got introduced to the sepia bleach, and after seeing what it did to the images, decided that it was needed for the project.

This is a little bit funny. Because it was Bleach and it was working, because of the other Bleach with the swords and the ghost people and such.

This is a tiny bit deeper, I promise.

I haven't read much of the early manga, as I watched the anime and then started reading when I ran out of it. But the early anime had some interesting lighting effects, and they may have gotten incorporated a bit in the process.

See, this is what the environment looks like when the characters are interacting with the normal world:

Which is a fairly normal colour palette for an anime. And then a couple of seconds later Rukia literally knocks Ichigo's soul out of his body so she can take his Soul Reaper butt to the park to take out a Hollow.

Screencapping level: novice.

I like how all the highlights are blown out and everything seems more ethereal. Well, ethereal for an anime. It's like...the light is harder, and infiltrates even the darkest corner. The small details are lost to the eye and even the air has tactile qualities, like the edge on the breeze of an autumn evening...

Ah. Yes. I think that in the anime this might have had a twofold purpose; 1. It let the audience know when the characters were interacting with spirits and 2. There were less details. Easier to animate. I've heard it said that 'Bleach has no backgrounds.'

I'll pay that.

Have another gander. Ichigo's first encounter with Rukia. And she looks back at him...

And then walks away. Ichigo realises that she's not part of the material world as the noises of everyone else who did not see the chick in samurai gear dispose of a giant mantis filter into his perceptions.

Screencapping level: should not be screencapping.

See the difference in the background? The contrast is heightened and the highlights are so overblown it feels like when I walk out of the darkroom to check stuff in white light.

Blinks Owlishly.


And I love it.

So, applied Bleach to prints to make the compositions feel less real. Or, less tied to flesh and blood reality, anyway. Dawg.

Oh. The toning was the second part of making-the-images-feel-like-they-weren't-tied-to-reality.

And then:

we came full circle. Scurrying to think of how to present the story, the Girl in the Blue Dress invented someone else without a name. An Observer.

I found it disturbingly easy to write like a crazy person.

I wrote a series of letters from the perspective of someone who'd sighted the Girl and had been unsure of what they were seeing, but decided to document it anyway. Eventually, they convince themselves of her existence only to find that she was a projection of themselves all along. Which explains the fabricated evidence and drawings, but not necessarily the photos.


Because those photos have to come from somewhere.

The idea of the submitted project was to leave that one open to the reader. To have it not-completely-resolved because it allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions about who and what the Girl is. Because even though she was fabricated by me, I believe that it's not too much to a stretch to see others with the same small existence, scratching at the wall of reality, desiring to be let in but unable to interact with the world that does not see them, because it's warmer on the inside.

That's about as profound as I can get for now. Talk to you later.

Silver in the City

I guess that this blog post, rather than be dedicated to the many many things I've got sitting on the backburner and have been eyeball-deep-in-uni-so-could-not-post might be a bit of a letdown. After all, it's really just more uni work. But it's also the core concept behind one of my photography subjects; specifically, Silver.

Silver is a third-year photography elective. Which means that next semester when I go to pick subjects, I won't give myself three ones that are a year up from my current level. Stupidhead. Anyway. Third year elective specific to film photography. Films and negatives and darkrooms and stuff. It's quite a bit of fun, and I enjoy the process and concept behind this type of photography more than others. I guess that's because there's a much smaller margin for error when creating photos. They're harder to fix when you get to developing the negs, and in general, you have to know what you're doing.

So. Concepts and stuff.

The course, as always, gives us a theme to work to and start with and the theme for Silver was 'Investigating the Shadow'


This sounded quite dark and intimidating to begin with, and in the first couple of weeks, I continued with printing photos from negs I had taken last year, along with stuff I'd taken for 'getting my eye back in'.

The only other thing you probably need to know at this stage is how I operate in the darkroom. This is pretty similar to how I used to work in TAFE. Don't feel like chatting while working. Stick headphones in and go. And the waiting period that you have to have while waiting for test strips to develop and then fix allows you to think in between working on things. So while the music is going, I don't always pay full attention to it.

This particular afternoon, I was walking out of the darkroom with Switchfoot in my ears. It was this song.

"we are

crooked souls trying to stay up straight

dry eyes in the pouring rain,

well,

the Shadow proves the Sunshine

the Shadow proves the Sunshine"

And like a bolt from the blue, there was the core idea. Sort of. I was going to talk about depression and hope in the brief. Shadow and Sunshine.

This initially was thought out as a series of constructed studio photographs, a bit like what I had done in the previous year with photography, where myself and some friends got to sit down and play with masks and stuff.

And stuff.

And then I went to Sydney three times during March. Each time I had a camera, and each time I took photos of the city. 

There were a lot of skyline photos, but there were some odd ones that cropped up too - tiny observations that kept crawling into my lens. I couldn't stop taking photos of them. 

And then I talked to the tutor about it. Very quickly, the project evolved into something else.

Depression and Hope in the City.

I have to admit, I liked where this was going; a take on the city which, while certainly investigated before, could have something added to it. Ack. Too many pronouns.

The city.

There was probably still stuff left over in Brooke's head from last year, where this clip got used for the Mask unit. Can't remember why it was relevant specifically. I think it got included because it's a beautiful clip.

But this got to pull the project more and more into that view of the city and the black and white and the soul in something so large and grey and paradoxical.

Add to that the fact that Anberlin, who have been mentioned earlier on this blog, are popular with me, and the album that the above song is called 'Cities'

Look at that album artwork. That is some beast work. It even looks like a city.

This album, which I've probably mentioned before, is my favourite out of all the work they've produced so far. It...ah.

It explores so many large themes and manages to do it with some kind of deep understanding that I love. And there's the music and the lyrics and the yes. It just feels like the city; at times peaceful or sunny, but also rushing along at the breakneck speed that comes with life and construct and all-of-the-things-I've-been-trying-to-express-this-afternoon.

Look. Just go and buy a copy of the CD. I was a muffinhead and bought the CD/DVD copy, so it was pretty expensive, but the standard twelve-track wasn't too pricy.

I guess that the song I explored more than the others in the making of this project (which is slowly turning into another 'Brooke really loves Anberlin' post) was actually the seventh track on the album, 'Hello Alone'.

From a lesser known, I'm here. And there's hope. There's hope.

I'm going to decide later whether making this was work or procrastination.

Hope is such a powerful thing. It keeps us going in the darkest of times. It gives us something to look forward to - My phone dictionary, as sad as it is, says '(any reason or encouragement for) the state of feeling that what one wants will or might happen.'

It's a pretty soggy definition, but it'll have to do for now. The point that the above definition is missing (I think) is that in order for there to be hope, there has to be some pretty unfun business going on first. We never hope when we're in a good patch. It's like a little candle, and it serves its greatest purpose at night, when we have little else to guide our steps.

Considering the emotions I have encountered in myself and others since moving to the metropolis of Newcastle, and the feel of the city in the first place, this seemed like a good place to start. Buildings and pavements and arriving here with the smell of London still on my shoes, used to the beat of a thousand floors - cobbles, gravel, pavement, bitumen - always hard and unforgiving.

(Pretty sure tears came to my eyes when I went for a walk through Hyde Park on the grass.)

Right about then.

But that's what the city is; it's rough and big and scary and it doesn't give a rats arse about you. It's grey and smelly and there's people everywhere but none of them see you. Not the real you, anyway. It sounds kind of unfun.

Through the project, I just really wanted to be able to show that; the simple play of dark and light in the city across all of it's artificiality. That as unforgiving and dark the city appeared, that there could also be something worth hoping in as well. Something outside of the grey stones and grey skies.

Something with promise. Because there's hope.

Transit #2 - logistics are fun.

So, now that we've cleared the essential concept-making-ness, I guess that the next thing to do is figure out how to keep up with my mouth. Or at least, make sure that it's possible to box the idea I just sold everyone.

The first thing I started doing in this regard was to go back over photos I'd already taken, and take some more that all happened in the car. Checking things like available shots, focal lengths, lighting availability; stuff like that.

Things got interesting with the initial experiments - I didn't have the car we travel in on hand - (a van to accommodate our cats, rats and elephants. And family members too I guess.) so instead I spent a couple of mornings and an afternoon fiddling inside the small car I drive instead.

This car is a small car. Small and blue and noisy and old and I love it to bits.

In terms of lighting, I discovered the obvious. The sunlight available at and given time will not be direct, and it won't be coming directly from above. Unless the van suddenly turns into a convertible. And that would be bad.

So, the greater portion of light streams in through whatever windows are closest to it. This I think will make achieving a workable white balance interesting - I am expecting quite a few images to either have an underexposed interior or overexposed windows. I don't want to use the flash unless it's absolutely necessary. Small spaces + bright flash = blown out, flat, flooded images. And blindness. I could add extra artificial lighting if need be that isn't a flash - or at least isn't as hard and white.

The windows of the car will probably either serve as a framing device, extra background, or a big black nuisance. Considering that the whole concept of the project revolves around the travel in the car, I think that it would be pointless trying to pretend that the steel structure of the car shouldn't be there.

Solution?
Take photos anyway. Embrace the framing. Do what has always been done and rock the spandex. So to speak.

What else can I address?

ah. kay.

I think I can do some depth-of-field work - photos with a foreground item in focus and nothing else. These can assist in picking up the small intricacies of travel; the texture of an item or simply to reflect the nature of human memory (this is what I mean by that). I recently figured out how to use the macro button on the camera. So I can do this with minimal effort.

In terms of problems I think I'll encounter, there will probably be a few.

Lighting. Too little, too much, in the wrong spot...I'll fiddle a bit with the shutter speed, and ISO to achieve what I'm after. I haven't found the settings to change the aperture on the camera yet.

Taking-photos-that-require-a-steady-base-in-a-car-that-is-moving-and-vibrating.

'Nuff said.

Simple travel logistics - where and when we stop; things I can take photos of in these places. Then again, I can usually improvise things to get where I'm going. Plans have been changed recently, so I won't be travelling the whole way north with the folks - they leave before I finish uni classes, so I'll fly to Brisbane and have the Brisbane-Hervey Bay (Northbound) leg to take photos on and the southbound trip will be the full length.
The time we leave will also influence the photos taken. We usually leave early morning - like about 0700 or 0800.

I'm also rather heavily relying on something I started calling the 'gambit factor' until I looked up 'gambit' to double check the meaning and realised that it's not a gambit at all.
Basically, I know that there is a certain amount of things that you cannot predict that can happen in a short period of time - things that often are out of control and can be crazy-good or crazy-bad. I tend to just roll with the punches and keep snapping. Sometimes I catch pictures that won't ever be repeated in the history of whatever we are measuring. It's like, the perfect mix of random elements to produce the maximum awesome.

Come to think of it, I think that's called Life.

Anyhoo. I'll write up a reflection on the snaps and travels shortly. Enjoy.

Transit.

I've got two posts mulling over at the moment. I'd write up the other one too if I had not left the crucial piece of paper I needed for it to make sense at home. Maybe tonight sometime I'll tell you all about the new game that Bec and I invented Friday week ago.

Anyhoo. I'd been so keen to get started on this concept and now half of the material is at home and I know that unless we get started now I'll be as helpless as I was in mid-semester for print this morning as I will be for photomedia.

Self-musings aside, I thought I'd tell you about what the phrase 'Transit' means. Because blogging assessments is a good way of sorting out ideas and reasoning in a way that is engaging and readable. Are we ready to chomp into the concept?

At the start of semester I picked up the big assessment for Photomedia, henceforth referred to as 'The Transit Project'. We are to create a ten-image portfolio conveying 'Transit'. The method of image-capture for me is digital, since I am doing Digital Photography.

So, when I started to look at the...thing...there was the usual brainfart.

What is this? How am I supposed to capture that? Where will I even start?

This escalated to maybe taking photos on trips to and from Sydney on the train. I've caught the train to old Siddles a few times before. It's do-able when it only costs $7.40 for a return ticket from Broadmeadow for a student. (So good!), and I liked the idea.

Until I realised that it would be done by heaps of people.

Identity issues through, I started on a different tangent, looking at maybe doing a stack of random images that each conveyed little facets of transit: the pathway trodden by five million pairs of shoes. The foreign coin sitting on the bus floor. The hundreds of leaflets from different attractions you saw on holiday. Or maybe that one is just me.

So, things were looking...mediocre.

And then there was an idea, so plain and simple and it was as cool and smarting as a face full of snowball.

Sort of.

It's only really been since I moved out that I really began to appreciate time with the folks. I mean, it started to be stronger in 2010, what with the 'you're not continuously in my grill because I'm not at school anymore'. Time with family is grand, and I'm really looking forward to the holidays because I'll see them again.

But this? This brainchild revolves around the fact that everytime I think of 'Transit', I think 'road trip'.

Every time I think 'road trip', I think 'Hervey Bay'

Hervey Bay is this city a bit bigger than Port Macquarie. It is where my paternal Grandmother and more of Dad's family lives, and we've been making this trip at least once a year for the past thirteen-fourteen years.

It might seem easy to belittle that distance, but the blue squiggly line represents over 800 kilometres of...transit. When we first started this trek, I was about 6. I think. Memories get a bit reshuffled, but I'm pretty sure that was the beginning. We used to take a couple of days; stay a night or two in Brisbane with some family friends - my younger sibling's godparents. Their daughter, Jasmine, used to braid my hair and braided it would stay for the three weeks of Christmas holidays we'd spend up there.

When the folks first moved up there, they lived on this big farm in Torbanlea, on the outskirts of Hervey Bay. They had a pool and Zelda on the '64, and that was just about the best thing in the world. My Aunts were still in High School, and my Pop owned an ice-creamery on the Esplanade.

I'm not sure what age I was when we started making the trip in one shot, but I remember those days being long. Really long. Over time, we whittled and honed this voyage down to a fine art - leaving in the early morning; it took us twelve hours all up. We had three stops; Coffs, Ballina and Caboolture. I had a gameboy, so that was all good with me.

Over time, it wasn't just the anticipation of Hervey Bay that I came to value.

It was the trip in itself.

Our family is well-acquainted with the inside of the car, and many of our...as you say - bonding experiences - surfaced from long days in the car together.

It was inevitable. There is no escaping the fact that we were going to spend this amount of time in a small space with a lot of people and at some point, someone is going to fart or spill their drink.

There were things we worked through; methods we forged and stuck to and now, while it's still very exciting to go to Hervey Bay, the trip is not a giant to fear.

Dad has ALWAYS packed the car. As myself and my brother have grown older, we have attempted to assist in some way in the packing of the car, but inevitably Dad will pull it all out and repack it at some stage before we leave. Dad packing means that we are right at the end of getting ready to leave and the rest of the family will be packed in also; it becomes on big game of tetris, really.

Now that every reader knows how we travel, I'd like to take the opportunity to justify this herculean trip with the design brief.

I want to take photos in the car.

Nice photos in the car.

I enjoy telling stories. This has probably become somewhat relevant over the last 2000 words or so. I love to share things that I find funny or interesting. I'm always keen for a good story, and enjoy the ones that affect your perception afterwards enough to change your perception on certain things in life.

...

How do you look at wardrobes?

Are they a potential gate to another world? Or simply a place to hang your coats?

Tell me a story. Make it a good one. Good enough that when I see a clock tower, I think of keyblades and fairy dust. Good enough to draw any individual in and change the way they think about something just enough to make them stop and smile.

Unless that is not your goal. If your goal is to make people afraid of things that go 'bump' in the night, at least make sure that the thing doing the bumping is big and has teeth. None of this tentacle business.

Where was I?

Roadies. Right.

So, I want to take photos that tell you the story of the bonds in my family. Tell you a story of the slightly dysfunctional family with tendancies to laugh at silly things and do group dances and travel over 800km in 12 hours.

I want to experiement enough to make things slightly less blurry and slightly more interesting without being...arty?

I'm putting the question mark there because arty is too often attributed to little skill and lots of flair. I'm interested in honest storytelling that isn't gaudy or gimmicky.

In my opinion, it doesn't need to be gimmicky. Because most people I know will have, at some stage, gone on that road trip with their family. It's a fairly solid storyline because it's so relateable.

I think that might have been one of the reasons why I loved Little Miss Sunshine so much.