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texfmp-blog · 8 years ago

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Final Evaluation FMP

Overcoming Challenges

Personal Problems

The start date of the Final Major Project was 22nd February. In January I found out that my Dad’s cancer had returned and there was nothing more the doctors could do for him. I left for Canada to look after my dad on the 16th of February and returned on the 31st of March. He passed away two days after returning so I have been dealing with the whole thing of loss and grieving throughout the project. Sadly, because of this nothing seemed to matter and I couldn’t focus or think straight, and everything felt “flat”. This has been the biggest challenge I’ve ever had to face in my life.

I feel like this isn’t just a challenge that will last the project but will affect me for the rest of my life, and how I deal with it is going to be a huge factor. At the moment I take every day one at a time and don’t make plans in advance just because I don’t know how I will feel. This has really helped and my tutors have been very supportive throughout this process. Sadly it’s meant my project hasn’t been top priority and I have pushed it to the side at times. Even though I’ve just lost my dad I’m still fairly happy with what I have accomplished in such a short time.

One of the things that has helped me the most is going to the river to just be with water and have it flow over me. Water has always been huge in my life even though I nearly drowned in the river Dart when I was 13 I have never lost my love for it. I still feel so held by the river when i'm swimming and feel like all my problems get washed away once I plunge my head beneath the surface. This song expresses how I feel.

Johnny Flynn – The Water

All that I have is a river

The river is always my home

Lord, take me away

For I just cannot stay

Or I'll sink in my skin and my bones

The water sustains me without even trying

The water can't drown me, I'm done

With my dying

Please help me build a small boat

One that'll ride on the flow

Where the river runs deep

And the larger fish creep

I'm glad of what keeps me afloat

The water sustains me without even trying

The water can't drown me, I'm done

With my dying

Now deeper the water I sail

And faster the current I'm in

That each night brings the stars

And the song in my heart

Is a tune for the journeyman's tale

The water sustains me without even trying

The water can't drown me, I'm done

With my dying

Now the land that I knew is a dream

And the line on the distance grows faint

So wide is my river

The horizon a sliver

The artist has run out of paint

Where the blue of the sea meets the sky

And the big yellow sun leads me home

I'm everywhere now

The way is a vow

To the wind of each breath by and by

The water sustains me without even trying

The water can't drown me, I'm done

With my dying

Nature photography and British Weather

The biggest challenge I encountered with the shoots was changeable weather. It was very difficult to predict what the weather would be like a week in advance. Planning was important for these shoots as I was reliant on getting lifts from my mum and we had to work around her work schedule. Between her schedule and the weather I was lucky to get 5 shoots at all in the time I had. I got round this by checking the weather app every morning and afternoon and when everything clicked we went for it -- from mum being free and able to drive me to the location, and the sky being good for the shoot I wanted to take (some clouds in the day and a completely clear sky at night) to the wind being light to moderate.

We had to cancel a beautiful night beach shoot on the Jurassic Coast because the winds grew to 45-50 miles per hour. I was gutted because the sky was crystal clear, meteor showers were predicted, and we were heading to Durdle Door (see photo below). I had intended to take a very long exposure through the night and was looking forward to the process as much as the results.

Limited Public Transport

Why didn’t I take public transport you might ask? Two of my shoots were night shoots which meant that public transport was off the menu. In terms of the day shoots on Dartmoor there are regular buses from Totnes to Dartmoor however the routes don’t go to the locations I wanted to shoot, which are more remote and had the features I needed for the project theme.

Light Pollution

Rather than calling the night shoot at South Milton Sands a write-off because of the light pollution from the neighboring coastal villages on one side and the over-exposure caused by the moon on the other side, I overcame this challenge by working with the light pollution, framing the shot with each bit of light distortion on either side. This added to the image and I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Research

I have always known a good amount about nature and reforestation. This helped me with the project since I already had a good idea of what is going on and some of the environmental issues happening regarding the nature that surrounds me.

When I lived in Canada there was a growing issue of mountain lions losing their habitats in the nearby mountains and to survive coming down closer and closer to human populations in order to find food. They were losing their habitats due to deforestation where logging companies would clear-cut, wiping out everything.

The pine beetle explosion a few years ago in Canada completely destroyed so much of the pine forests it was devastating to forest ecosystems. This explosion was caused by multiple factors such as humans not allowing natural fires which created natural gaps in the forest that contained the life cycle of the beetle. Another factor is global warming which has resulted in warmer winters that no longer stop freeze the larvae, thereby keeping the numbers in balance.

Watching all of this happen through my lifetime has made me appreciate the nature we have around us. I do not want to lose what we still have and I want us to take responsibility for everything that we have done that affects the world that we live in.

Closer to home, in Britain I had already known that the whole of Dartmoor was once forest, and that the clearing of trees began as far back as the Bronze Age. What I didn’t know before doing extensive research for this project was how big an impact grazing sheep have on the uplands, and how much of this impact is the compression of soil causing erosion, flooding and mud slides, not to mention the consequence that very little can grow apart from bracken, gorse and grass.

I got very into the subject of beautiful nature on my last FMP. My focus then was on what I experienced in my everyday life on foot and cycling in my immediate vicinity. For this year’s FMP I stayed with natural beauty but took it further afield and by doing this discovered more about places near my home, including and in particular Dartmoor and how much we have lost. That’s how I got the idea of “Desolate Nature”.

I did enough research to inform my project. George Monbiot and David Taylor influenced me the most in terms of what I photographed and how I photographed it: George Monbiot on ‘the what’ and David Taylor on the techniques behind ‘the how’.

I am happy with the two B&W photos of Dartmoor and think they work alongside the theme of my project however I feel that without some writing next to them they just look like fine art photographs. What I was trying to convey was not just the beauty of the contours of the land but the contrast too between the wooded area juxtaposed with the barren hills.

One of the reasons I found this so difficult to convey is because the deforestation happened so long ago, and we’ve all become so accustomed to Dartmoor looking as it does. All we see is this gorgeous place but if there were still tree stumps there showing that trees had recently been cut down we’d see it as this horrific rape of the land. This fact of what happened is hidden in the ‘beauty of moorland’ and the passage of time. In a different way the clear cuts in Canada are hidden from view by the loggers leaving a thin strip of trees on the edge of the roads to hide the devastation behind. I’ve seen this myself personally. “Out of Sight Out of Mind” is the theme of an environmental photo shoot I would like to complete one day - I’ve already done a few shoots for this idea. This project has been a good learning experience toward that goal.

Researching the photographer David Taylor really inspired me to do lots of night shoots and showed me the really nice idea of putting a torch down in front of something in the foreground to illuminate it in full detail (which would otherwise be a silhouette) when taking a long exposure shot. This is a very simple technique but seems to have snuck under the radar of many photographers. This was an amazing thing to know and I’m very happy I utilised this in my project.

Considering how vast the subject of my project is, and how many articles, books and magazines there are all written by so many amazing people, I would have liked to have done more research into this. The research I did do was interesting and invaluable, and I used every last bit of it in the projects. One might say I cherry picked and made the most out of what I had.

Planning & Production

To catch up from having missed so much while I was away, after I got back I blocked out a week where I focused entirely on college work the whole week in the 2nd half of May. I organised my time in that week and generally by focusing on the project in short bursts and alternating with breaks, it helped me get back into the project. This approach to course work generally helps me to avoid ‘burning out’. Taking regular breaks helps me to be more productive and also to avoid getting migraines from reading and writing, which can happen easily for me if I push myself too hard or if i’m reading or writing for too long at a stretch.

It was very helpful for me to do this because I was so behind after missing so much when I was in Canada and then not being able to focus when I came back. After that week I felt more hope and belief that I could actually complete the project.

Over the last two years I’ve noticed that if I’m not already motivated to do something I have to get engaged with it first and then the motivation comes after I’ve engaged. This is a very useful learning to know about myself and how my brain works, and will help me in the future I’m sure with anything I do.

Practical skills

Considering I’ve been under a lot of stress and pressure because of the things that have been happening in my personal life, I think I have produced a decent amount of work to what I would say is a high enough standard. I’m certainly not as happy with the results I’ve achieved with this project compared to last year’s final major project. Photographically my work has definitely improved, specifically the night shoots which I hadn’t done before. My knowledge of my camera and what it can do has grown significantly. Of course there are always new things to learn however I am in no rush. I’m glad I experimented with Photoshop for the project. I intentionally broadened my horizons because my natural tendency is to stick with RAW.

Using Photoshop I experimented with taking the best parts of different images, and combining them together to create a new image. One of these is in the final show. I am really proud of it.

Last year I did my FMP in a workbook and I think it looked really good, clean and professional, and because I filled every page and thought a lot about layout and design it was obvious how much effort I put in. It felt great to be able to hold a tangible object in my hands, something I had created.

The downsides of this is that it was very expensive because I had to print all the images not just those for the final show, plus all the contact sheets, everything. It was also very time-consuming to write everything out by hand. Because of this I decided to do this FMP using Tumblr. This has been easy to use and has been good practice for developing my professional online footprint so to speak. The result looks good however I miss having a real object that I can thumb through.

Evaluation / Reflection

Throughout the project I evaluated after every shoot, analysing the contact sheet. I then chose my favourite photos from that shoot and went into depth with each of them in the editing process. I then went back to the previous shoots to see how the photos worked together. What isn’t evidenced in the blog is this organic, continuous process of to-ing and fro-ing, of doing and reflecting.

The way my brain works means that a lot of my work is in my head, I’m thinking and processing well before I express it. And I will go over the ideas multiple times before I express myself verbally or in writing, What I express tends to be the finished thought rather than the process I’ve been though. In looking over the project posts I can see this is still the case.

I think that my evaluation of the technical and aesthetic quality of my work was strong and consistent throughout the project. In retrospect what I now see I missed was the strength of the images to convey the story I wanted it to convey. I realise now that my images weren’t as good at getting this across by themselves as I originally thought. I needed to have that break from writing about the project and just look at the images and look for what I got from the images on their own without having the writing next to them, and without being coloured by already knowing what my intention was in taking the images. I think this idea of letting my images sit and coming back to them later will really help me in future, This realisation is helping me to notice how important it is to not wait to the last second to get my work finished. Having that space to sit and wait has helped me see the flaws and the imperfections and to appreciate what went really well.

I’ve always thought that photographs are so important in their role of storytelling, and how much can be said from just a single image. For me the best example of this is Edward Burtynsky’s River of Blood (see image below) and how you look at it and instantly see what it is about. I don’t think I managed to achieve this as well as I would have liked to. This is a bit disappointing especially as this is a subject I’m so passionate about, and one I think is so important given what’s happening in the world around us environmentally and politically.

River of blood through scorched earth. (Nickel contamination in Ontario) Photo by "Manufactured Landscapes" Edward Burtynsky.

Presentation

Sadly, due to my father’s condition I missed two months of college at the very beginning of the project and so I couldn’t take part in any of the proposal presentation sessions - so I didn’t make a mood board or take part in the peer feedback for this stage of the project.

My attendance in 2017 is certainly nothing to be proud of. It wasn’t because I was slacking; it was about me dealing with stress and finding ways of staying healthy mentally. Sometimes I deal with stress well, sometimes I don’t. Stress mixed with grief is not something you can be taught but is something you learn by going through it. I’ve also been dealing with insomnia off and on for years, but over the past months it’s been worse, not surprisingly perhaps.

Working at college has been difficult for me since my Dad’s death. I found it almost impossible to work with lots of people around, so I took a lot of days off to work from home. The only reason I’ve done as well as I have with this project is because of how supportive my tutors have been. They understand that I need to take time off to grieve, and work from home a lot of the time.

I looked at platforms such as wordpress for my blog but decided to stick with Tumblr for the ease of its linear design. I like that you can scroll through the posts in chronological order rather than having to click on individual posts. The downside of Tumblr is that you don’t have much freedom to play around with the design. In future I might use Flickr or 500XP because they are much more specialised photography platforms, however they’re not as adequate when it comes to blogging. On balance I’m happy with my decision to use Tumblr and I’m pleased with the finished product.

My blog could have been better if I had included a more diverse selection of photographers beyond Dartmoor or the UK, people like Edward Burtynsky for example and Sebastio Salgado, both photographers I have loved for years and whose work I admire and which exemplifies the power that images have to tell stories without the need of words.

I’m looking forward to seeing how my work will look when it’s displayed. I’m extremely happy with how my business cards turned out. I can’t wait to see the final six images set out on the board as I’ve planned it. I excited to see them together with the work of all my colleagues from the course.

I’ve gone for six images laid out in a rectangle - the top and bottom pairs are in landscape, the middle pair is in portrait. I like having the two images that well work together sandwiched between the two diptychs. They add some variety and compliment each other, and will be separated by my business cards displayed in the centre of the board.

Character Development

Drive, responsibility and grit are three of the things I’ve learnt most about myself and developed throughout this project. There have been many days where I really didn’t care about anything: not the project, the course, not anything in life. It took grit and drive for me to push through this phase of depression.

By responsibility I mean the kind where I have to look after myself. “Beware the naked man offering you a shirt” is good advice I heard recently. I learnt that I can’t always help others, I need to help myself first at times, especially right now. I learnt that it’s okay to let people down sometimes and that they will be okay, and that they can go to another friend if they really need help. I learnt that good friends will be understanding if I need to take some time off. I’ve learnt the value of solitude and that it’s not just okay to be alone sometimes it’s essential.

I found taking things day by day the most important lesson I learnt, whether that was finding my way to the river or even to the shower, going for a quick walk or a cycle ride, or sleeping out under the stars. A lot of it was feeling my emotions - if I was angry I’d be angry and would embrace it and not suppress it. If I was sad I’d be sad and I’d be with it. I discovered how much of a lifeline music was and still is to me, and I will always have nature to help me calm down and be able to sit with myself entirely with no thoughts and just be. That’s what I learnt about myself.

The irony in all this is that all the things I did and didn’t do that I thought would result in me failing the project actually helped me navigate my challenges so that I could complete the project well and on time. Given the circumstances I am more proud of the work I’ve done for this project even though the work I did last year was objectively better and earned a Distinction. I feel proud of my accomplishments and how I’ve moved through this challenging time. The feeling I’ve had is like I’ve been paddling upstream and then finding out later I was paddling away from a very steep waterfall!

#evaluation #planning and production #research

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