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Unit 9 Evaluation. Sam Wheatley. History of Photography.
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Unit 9 Evaluation Sam Wheatley
History of Photography The unit started with a PowerPoint presentation about the history of photography. I made a few slides about the most notable and interesting events relevant to the creation of modern photography. I went through several timelines online, and picked out the ones I found most interesting and relevant in chronological order. I made two slides about the uses of photography in the past and moving up to more modern times, highlighting how commercial uses and values change as a product becomes more and more available and advanced.
People in photography For the history of photography, we had to do three slides about important people in history, and explain the impact they had. After this presentation, we made another PowerPoint presentation about a single important person in history, I did mine on Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, as a quick Wikipedia check showed me that there was lots I could write about him. These two presentations introduced us to photography, learning about it’s impact in the past and in modern terms. It helped for grasping the standards of photography and how fast it is advancing.
Photography presentations The two presentations I made with pretty much the same process. We were supplied a few website addresses and I found some others with Google searches. For each topic; timelines, person, culture… I would have a few web pages open on the subject and look between them for research. When doing reports on important people in history, I had to research the potential people and decide who had the most interesting things to write about, so I could do the full PowerPoint on the most interesting one I found the presentations quite enjoyable, the information I got for my presentation was quite interesting and I did learn a lot in self directed study.
Gallery visits We had two local galleries suggested to us and were asked to visit them and then research the work there to make a blog post on them, quite similar to the report we did on David Blandly’s work in the last unit. I only visited one of the galleries, as one was never open when I went to visit, as it only being opened that week. I was not particularly fond of the Gallery I visited, as I didn’t think the photography really meant anything other than showing what was happening. The gallery was mostly about the happenings in Cairo; a city in Egypt which is becoming unstable due to rapid urbanisation and a growing gap between the classes. I looked around the gallery at the pictures, and took a newspaper with a report of the event for research. As I found the display uninteresting, I had little to write about it. My report was mostly done using a summary of the gallery online and short biographies of the photographers. My blog post had a large chunk devoted to my opinions of the display and an explanation why.
CD Case We were assigned a longer task to create a CD cover using photographs we would take ourselves and Photoshop. The first stage was deciding what album to make a cover of. I don’t listen to any music at all, so I was allowed to make a videogame cover instead. Most videogames I play I wouldn’t be able to make a cover for, because the images most recognised and associated with the game are not images I could photograph. Most games were dismissed as I did not have access to the necessary weaponry, and I was not willing to use myself as a model for the protagonist. Mentally going through a list of games I play, I got a short list of games with iconic images that I could plausibly photograph. I decided on either; Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, or Half Life.
Video Game case options I made little spider diagrams for the three game options for photographs I could take. Binding of Isaac: Basement, child, knife, religious symbols The Stanley Parable: Doorways, Security screens, Office environments Half Life: Crowbar, Laboratory environments. Binding of Isaac was dropped as the imagery was too dark, and would likely be uncomfortable for anyone involved. Half Life was dropped as the images that I could photograph left too much out of the game. The Stanley Parable was selected because all other options were worse, but it was a good selection. It’s an underappreciated game, hugely praised by those who played it but has not been played by too many. And as an unofficial mod, it doesn’t have cover art.
The Stanley Parable designs The main poster images for The Stanley Parable are the two doorways and the wall of screens. The first representing the importance of choice and the second representing how you are constantly being watched and controlled. Text is very important, as the story is dialogue driven, the ‘antagonist’ appearing only through narration. The first design was focused on choice. The cover featured several different two option choices in a sort of collage, with the tagline ‘the only choice is failure’. The back had a somewhat sinister foreword by the narrator. I kept all the text from this design into the other ones, but consider the front design to be my worst option, as it didn’t really have any deeper purpose other than emphasising choice, and it didn’t look particularly attractive. The second design was a wall of screens, quite simply. I kept the tagline and the blurb, but on the back I added the two doorways in the concrete wall that was the background. The front was focused on the center screen ‘427’ which had static, while the rest were blank. The background of concrete gave a nice feeling of apathy and inhospitality, the business with the screens clearly being unfeeling and not social. The third design followed from the second, but with a close up of screen 427. The screen now displays an image of the two doorways, along with close captioning […he entered the door on his left.]. This had a good combination of the ideas, with choice, observation, and the captioning reviewing the constant narration of the game. On the back of this design was the same screen at the bottom of the cover, but panning towards the door on the right, foreshadowing the possibility of defying the narration.
Design one Design two Design three
Final design I ended up choosing the second design, the one with the wall of screens. I asked people in my class and general opinion was that the wall of screens gave a larger impact and impression that something was happening, and overall just looked more impressive. I hadn’t decided totally while I was taking photographs, but while looking through the photographs, I realised that the third design wouldn’t look as good, as I could not find a set of doors which gave the same impression of choice as the game image. I did Photoshop two doors next to each other, but while it looked ok on the back in small, it probably wouldn’t have looked very impressive as the focus.
Photos I wanted to take photos of anything I could possibly use for the cover, which led to me going around any buildings vaguely office like, and taking quite a few pictures of walls. I was still kind of stuck between designs, and the quality of photographs would decide it. The main images I needed were a security screen, a pair of doors, and a concrete wall. Oddly, the concrete wall was one of the hardest. I took many pictures of screens from around college, a library, an electronics store, and an internet café, I also got my dad to get some photographs of security monitors from work. I decided on the internet café monitor as it was very plain and mechanical looking, and also it was wall mounted. The doorways ended up as a picture of one door which was copied in Photoshop and imposed onto a picture of a wall. The doors were too obviously the same door, so I took another photograph of the same door, but rearranged the objects in the hallway behind it. I took several photos of walls, but when the time came to choose one, none of them looked right. Only concrete gave the right effect, and the pictures of concrete I had found had poor proportions or angle. I went back out while making the final cover to take more photos of concrete before I was satisfied with a background.
Photoshopping The mask tool was a very important tool, selecting just the box of a monitor and the doorway away from the wall to be used. I put the two doors, flipped to face opposite directions, onto a blank wall, and put a monitor on top of it for the back. I put the doors in a screen, similar to the third design, on the back rather than just in the wall, as it just looked out of proportion on the background. The monitors were copied and spread along the front, and the numbers were painted onto the concrete with the paint tool. I put static in the center one, which wasn’t a photograph but just an image taken from Google due to the difficulty of photographing static. In the rest of the monitors I put the office environment photographs I had taken which I thought looked fitting. To keep focus on the center monitor, the over screens were put under a blur filter with different levels of intensity the further away they were from the center, the images on the screens got the same blur, as did the painted numbers. After this, the box logos, bar codes, rating etc. were added, and I copied the blurb, title and tagline from the design into the final. I made some minor adjustments to images so that they looked in place. Some adjustment tools let me change brightness, contrast and colour content of images. The resize, rotate and skew tool were frequently used to match the images to the background, as was occasional cropping and the blur tool for the combination of images.
Issues I came across a few hiccups over the course. While making the second design I had a weird error where I could only edit a layer if I never selected a different layer, if I clicked onto another layer and back again, I didn’t have permission to edit anything. I eventually just deleted the design and started from scratch as this was easier, I never did find out what was wrong with it. While photographing, my first issue was that the camera ran out of battery half way through, so I needed to return to college to switch the memory card to a different camera before going back out. The right sort of wall was hard to come by, while making the final cover I noticed none of the walls looked right, so I went back out to take more pictures of concrete before returning to finish. I was also disappointed that the big boxy televisions no longer seem to exist, these would have worked better for the security screens. I was very new to Photoshop, so I had to ask the teacher how to do most things, but this did mean that I learnt.
What was learnt I learnt how to use an array of Photoshop tools, such as mask, blur, adjust, magnetic lasso etc… Stuff like docking images and dragging them to another Photoshop document and how to speed up processes you do frequently, such as ‘recent filters’ and auto-select. Some preparation skills were learnt, I had to list the photographs I would need to take, and then choose which game to make a cover on based on the possibility and interest value of the photographs. Then I took any photos I could that were on the list and chose which design to do afterwards. Most skills learnt were how to use Photoshop, unsurprisingly.
