Flying Into Tokyo.

Evaluation.

For this project I had to use a quote that was randomly selected from the book the Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore as my starting point, which was,

 “Photography is inherently an analytical discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and select a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artefacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.”

To be honest I wasn’t too keen about the quote, it was broad which I thought gave me too much freedom that I didn’t know where to start and was a bit tedious and it didn’t really give me much inspiration. Instead of journals I had to create a blog which wasn’t too bad for me since I’ve been wanting to make for a while, but it got a bit annoying when the site was usually down and meant that I couldn’t really do much.

I much prefer working in journals rather than blogs when it come to showing my research, ideas etc. I like how it feels more personal. Despite that, I will still be updating/posting this blog.

 Anyway, by reading the quote repeatedly I started to not mind it and it wasn’t as boring as I originally thought.

 Basically the quote made me think of simplicity, control, my point of view and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The Decisive Moment’. With that, the main ideas that I got from this was to try and capture motion. So I started to look at some of Philippe Halsman’s work who had done something similar to my idea. Then this reminded me of my previous project where I photographed people doing Parkour/Freerunning, which involved a lot of movement which I thought would be good for this project.

However I drifted away from taking photographs and instead tried making a video to show more of the movement as well a to show my point of view and by slowing down parts of the footage allowed me to simplify it. Rather than capturing one frame it captures nearly everything.

 I’m not very good with shooting video so I asked one of my friends to help with it. It was a bit awkward at first cause I’m used to being behind the camera rather than directing it. But all in all it was a fun experience, shooting and editing the footage.

 Despite the slow start and problems with the blog, I quite enjoyed this project. I liked looking at both photographs and videos and a bit of the freedom that the quote has given me. Overall I am pleased with the final video even though it’s not exactly perfect. What I need to work more on is probably my research, which I think needs to be more in depth, show more development and test shots, explore more techniques and be more clear with my idea throughout the project and manage my time more efficiently.