Portfolio Week 8

Portfolio

Week 8

Final Week/Cutting and Hanging of out Final Prints

So this week we did out Final edits of our Images and sent our Final Prints of to be Printed. Once we got the Prints back we then started cutting which I have to admit I was dreading a bit cause I remember the last print I tried to cut I had a lot of trouble with a ruler and knife and this time i didn't just have one I needed to cut I had sixteen so I wouldn't exactly say i was looking forward to it lol, BUT I asked my Mum if she'd be willing to help me with it and she said yes so I had my Mum helping me :D

Before Mum got to school though I did have a major issue with cutting one of the images and I had no idea how to fix it so Aroha had to help me and after that I decided it'd be best not to touch the images till I had someone with me who would be willing to help me all the way through the cutting process lol which Mum was really amazing with once she got to school :D

Once Mum and I had finished with the cutting we went out to start hanging the Images. Before hanging them Caryline helped us with measuring the wall so we knew where the middle was, she then helped us with putting test pieces of paper on the wall so we had an idea of where we would be hanging the images we also then decided on a measurement of one and a half cm between the images that were paired, and after that we started the hanging process of the final prints. Mum and I did a really good Job of hanging the bottom images BUT once it got to the top images we we're a bit short so Caryline had to help me with hanging the top ones we also got one a bit crooked that caryline had to help me with fixing as well lol.  

Once everything was hung I felt very proud of myself I am extremely happy with the final result :D

Everything we've done this whole term with taking the images to editing to deciding on images and presentation it all kinda lead to this and I am extremely happy with how it turned out :D

Portfolio Week 7

Portfolio

Week 7

Final Layout

So this week I showed Caryline the layout my Family and I had decided on the week Before.

When I showed Caryline the layout we decided on changing it around a little more and came up with  this my Final Layout.

I really love this layout. I don't think there's much repetition which I was trying to avoid doing since a lot of my images were taken a similar way. I think the Images work well together and I like how it looks like a very loss kinda Triangle. I'm very happy with this, I showed the class as they liked it too, I am very excited to see how it looks on the school wall once everything is cut and printed next week :D

Caryline and I spoke about how far apart I wanted the images that are next to each other BUT to be honest I have no Idea I think that'll be something I'll focus more on next week once I see all the prints. I kinda want them kinda close but not touching each other close BUT I guess that'll be something I'll finalize next week.

Really exciting seeing it all come together :D

Digital Technology 2: Week 6: AIPA/Aaron K

Digital Technology 2

AIPA/Aaron K

So this Week Aaron K came to speak to us about his company AIPA, which is a company that helps both Emerging and Professional Photographers. The website helps you get in contact with other emerging or professional photographers and also helps you get work whether it be assisting in letting clients, studios, or companies get in contact with you.  AIPA also helps with Copy Write of your images and have forms and sheets that you can print out to have your clients sign so you know you own all copy write to your images. AIPA also have people on their site that you can contact if you ever run into any issues and you don't know what to do, they will take you through the whole process and help you get the issue resolved. All round the AIPA site a really good site to join if your wanting to get into the photography industry both to safe guard your work and to help you get contacts within the industry. 

Portfolio Week 6

Portfolio 

Week 6

Deciding on a Layout 

So this week was spent mainly trying to choose images I thought would look nice next to each other and deciding how I wanted to lay them out in sequence like Aroha had shown me the week previous. I asked my parents what they though cause I was having a bit of issue with it BUT I definately knew I wanted a sequence layout for my presentation of my portfolio.
I came up with a few different presentation idea's throughout the week and put all my images in different area's to see if they'd work till I came up with this grouping which I quite liked.

I liked the idea of having a few single ones in the grouping as well so it kinda balanced out everything. I asked my Mum about this grouping and she quite liked it BUT I kinda liked the idea of having an image in my portfolio that had more than one Horse and Rider in it which I had an image of so I re-did the grouping to see if I could fit an image like that in my Portfolio and came up with this which I decided I liked a lot more.

I liked the difference in a way that the image with two horses added to the portfolio cause all the other images are of one horse and one rider and each one was with either a dark horse or a light coloured horse BUT that one with two kinda had a dark and light coloured horse together and it still showed connection and it doesn't only show connection between the horse and rider it shows connection between the two horses and the two riders etc. so I thought it worked well amongst the other images. Although I was a little unsure still if it went well in my portfolio being such a different image I decided to keep it anyway. I asked my parents what they thought and they agreed so I decided this would be the grouping I'd show the class for the next Week :)

Digital Technology 2: Week 5: Conor Clark

Digital Technology 2

Week 5

Conor Clark

This week we traveled to meet Conor Clark at a kinda private residency in Waitawa Regional park that she is currently staying at. Conor is the 11th photographer to be chosen to take images of an island there that is slowly being drilled away for some kinda of deposit. Chair of the Auckland's Councils Arts says, her selection for the project was based on her talent and well researched application. Conor is an exceptional Auckland artist who has made a name for herself internationally, he says, Her work is sublime yet ominous, disturbing yet beautiful. We are delighted to attract her back to NZ and the inspiration of Waitawa. We are delighted to welcome the born and bred Aucklander back to her roots.  

I really enjoyed hearing Conor talk about her photography and thought a lot of what she said was very informative and I loved finding out that she is also from South Auckland like me and that she had been considering entering the same photography competition in Pukekohe that I had entered one of my photographs in, in the middle of the year which I thought was quite cool. 

While at Conor's we went for a long walk to the top of a hill to see more clearly the Island that Conor was taking images of, I thought I was going to die walking up that hill but it was completely worth it the view from the top was AMAZING!!.

These are some of the Images I took while up there :)

I atm can't see the images that Conor has taken of the Island BUT I'm guessing hers would have been taken from a lot closer I remember her saying that she was planning on hiring a boat and going around the island in it to take closer images which I obviously couldn't do BUT I'm still very happy with these images, I think the scenery is stunning. Conor may also sail to the island it's self and get images on it maybe a bit like the bottom image I put of Conors on this blog which I obviously couldn't do either cause we didn't have the facilities to do that. BUT I'm just happy I made it up the hill to get these images lol. I quite like these images though cause I feel they're really scenic and you can fully see whats around the island as well not just the island.

Information about Conor Clark

Conor is a 33yr old New Zealand born Berlin based Landscape and Architectural photographer who specialises in observational photography. 

Conor has exhibited at 2 Rooms Gallery in Auckland and Photospace in Wellington.

Conor has been shortlisted for Best Series in the upcoming 2015 Renaissance Photography Prize in London and recently received an IdeasTap Award at the Dusseldorf Portfolio Review at the NRW-Forum as part of Dusseldorf Photo Weekend 2015. 

  

Portfolio Week 5

Portfolio

Week 5


Picking and choosing images for my Portfolio and deciding how to arrange them.

For portfolio this week I did my first lot of test prints and start choosing the images I thought I might like to use for my portfolio. Since starting my shoots I'd been making little collages as a way of trying to make less work for myself at the end.

This collage was one of my first collages I attempted doing. To begin with I thought up the idea of having everything kinda even. I wanted a main one in the middle which I thought would look good as a black and white one. Two portrait images on either side. Two Horse images on the other side of those. I wasn't to sure what I wanted in the next row so those were kinda test images, and then the last two images being the same person and horse so it all kinda looked even.

This collage was a bit of a "I'll just do it to see how it looks" kinda collage lol. I started wondering how it'd look if I had a really big image in the middle which again I decided in the same black and white image as the middle image of the last collage and how that image would look with a whole heap of little ones all around it. Once I'd finished with the collage I decided against it though when I compared it with the images in a line I thought that one and the image line up looked better. 

Later on in the week we made contact sheets with all our images we were considering to use for our project and printed them out into small images so we could start choosing and deciding the images we wanted to use for our project with actual images. This was my 2nd line collage I decided to do with a few different images just to try and see which images looked better together. I decided after this one that that first one I did looked better BUT this one I liked cause it had a lot more different shoots included in it. Again for this one I tried to make the images similar in the same place on both sides, although the last images I wasn't sure on cause one was landscape and the other portrait. 

 

This was my next grouping of images I tried putting together. Caryline helped me with these as I couldn't decide how I wanted my images to be arranged. I kinda came up with an idea of having images like this and showed Caryline, after showing her we started changing images around to try and work out which ones worked best together, we came up with this and I really liked the photo grouping  BUT I wasn't to sure about the gap at the top so we mixed them up again and came up with a different arrangement.

And this was the arrangement we came up with which I really liked, and this was arrangement that made me fully decided I wanted to stick with arrangements more like this than the line ones. I liked both the image's we picked and the arrangement of them in this grouping . So I showed this arrangement to the class and that's when it changed yet again lol. 

When showing the previous image to the class Aroha came up the idea of grouping images so they look more like a sequence. She used the top two images as an example of Coralee's hand is under the chin of both horses and it kinda seems like the same image but taken from two different angles. I thought that sounded really interesting cause I hadn't thought of it so thought I'd see what I could come up with using the same idea over the weekend.  

First Test Prints

This is an image of a test print I took cause my friend in the images wanted to see how the test print looked after being printed on the paper cause she was considering getting a canvas done with the same image. I found these test print very good in terms of how I needed the colours on the images to look for the finals. These specific images I thought looked good in terms of colour etc, the one beside I thought needed the oranges taken down as I though the image looked a bit too orange on the print and the one beside that one I thought needed more contrast for the final print. 

   

Digital Technology 2: Week 4: Garth Badger

Digital Technology 2

Week 4

Garth Badger

Garth and his dog Nico

Photography by Aroha :)

Our trip to see Garth Badger was really fun and extremly educational. When we first got there he introduced us to his Dog Nico who was the cutest dog I'd ever seen equal to my dog Bella LOL. He kept running into the room Garth was speaking to us in and then he'd start playing with random stuff on the floor and wanting pats it was really distracting but also the cutest thing I'd ever seen at the same time lol.

Nico :)

Photography by Aroha 

This is an image of me patting Nico while on our class trip :)

Two things I remember quite clearly that Garth said while on our class trip is that he really likes to work in smaller studios over the bigger ones because he likes that you can connect and interact with people a lot more more in  smaller studios rather than not talking to people so much in the larger ones. He also mentioned that when your taking images of people to talk with them first and get to know them a bit before taking your images, so your clients know your not just interested in taking images of them and then leaving, your also interested in them as people as well. These are two things that really stuck with me when listening to him speak, especially the last one because if someone was to ever ask me to do a shoot for them I wouldn't want them to think taking the images is all I cared about so it was nice to hear a professional photographer bring that up that you need to get to know them as well :)

He also mentioned while on our class trip that he doesn't always take inspiration from photographers when it comes to his work, he also takes inspiration from films and Film Directors and one of the Film Directors he mentioned was "Lars Von Trier" who was the director of a Drama/Horror film called "The Anti-Christ" which  Caryline and I found this image to a few days later while researching.

When I first saw this image the first thing that caught my attention about it was the water droplets bouncing of her head and hands from the water hitting them, and I thought what if I could get an image with water droplets like that too. I've never really worked with water in my photography before so I thought it could be a good challenge for me :) I actually wanted an image very similar to this with a model in the shower and water droplets kinda bouncing of her in the same way BUT I very quickly worked out that it was extremely hard to do something similar to this especially using our shower cause it's very tiny and has a white background which was very hard to capture droplets with since water droplets tend to be a lighter shade of colour as well, compared to this image where they obviously have a much larger shower and it's filmed in black and white so the colours come out a lot more. Plus this is a movie still so would have been a lot easier to get a still with the water like that unlike mine which is a photo which was a lot harder lol. I was still determined I was going to get an image with water droplets though so I decided to do close ups of my sisters hand and arm and try and get a similar affect that way.

I choose this image as my response image as it shows the best water droplets to me and I changed it to black and white to match the image above :)

I wasn't able to get the full round droplets like in the image above which I was a bit disappointed with BUT when I was thinking about it later I realised I probably should have had her moving cause that would have probably created the droplets wanted like in the above image but I was still happy I got even one image with droplets cause of how hard I found it to take an image like this so I was really happy despite :)

Another difference in comparison is the shadowing which I wanted to avoid but couldn't really get away from cause of how small our shower in our rental house is. The image above doesn't have any but that's because they were working with a much larger space than I was lol. 

The top image was also taken with a proper film lens so make the image look a lot wider to mine which was taken with a camera lens.

These are two of my other attempts I took at the same hand images from a lower angle and a portrait rather than a landscape style image, when I was trying to test out which way worked better to get the droplets. I felt the one I used worked better cause to me you could see the water droplets a lot more than these two image and I felt the landscape looked better than the portrait type image so to me  the one I used felt more successful. 

Information about Garth Badger

Garth Badger is one of New Zealand's  leading image makers, shooting a broad range of subjects  including advertising, fashion, sports, and music. His imagery blends between still photography and  moving imagery. His work has aired in TV across Australia and New Zealand, launched music careers, opened fashion shows, and featured on websites world wide. Garth's work had a natural feel that allows his subjects  to be captured in a way that feels confident and effortless. His work captures people stories and tells them in the most powerful of ways. 

Information about Lars Von Trier and the Anti-Chris Film

Lars Von Trier is a Danish Director born in 1956. He is sort after as being one of the most accomplished and influential directors in world cinema. He began making films at the age of 11 and has won multiple prizes for his work including the Palme d'Or (for "Dancing in the Dark"),  The grand Prix, The technical grand prize (for "The Elements of Crime"), and the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. His Film "The Anti-Chris" is one of his more well known and successful films alone with many others. It's a 2009 Danish experimental horror film written and directed by Lars Von Trier. It's a story about a couple who, after the death of their child, retreat to a cabin in the woods where a man experiences strange visions and the women becomes increasingly violent with sexual behaviours and sadomasochism. The story is divided into four chapters and an epilogue. The film was mainly filmed by a Danish production but also co-produced by six other companies from six different European countries. It was filmed in both Germany and Sweden.  

Digital Technology 2: Week 3: John Pusateri

Digital Technology

Week 3

John Pusateri

'And Counting'

What was this work about??

The above project is a Project aimed at showing the growth or decline of the New Zealand native bird the Kakapo. John's aim through this project is to visually show the viewer the desperate need to protect these endangered birds, using around 200 hand printed, colour photo lithogaphs on paper, using crayon crosses to show the viewer just how much these birds need to be protected.

How does the presentation of this work effect the way you view it??

I feel the presentation of this work personally is very powerful. I knew from the moment I saw this project without even knowing the backstory that it had to have something with the endangerment of some kind of bird although I have to admit when I first walked in I didn't know it was about the Kakapo. I think the X's on the images in themselves are quite powerful. Just how they show the viewer that these are the birds that are going to disappear if we don't do anything to change this and it really makes you think, do we want these birds to disappear and what should we be doing to prevent this.

Portfolio Week 4

Portfolio

Week 4

Photography Inspiration 

I've loved these Silhouette Images that "Shelley Paulson" does since the first moment I saw them and the whole time I've been doing this project all I've wanted to do is try at least one BUT unfortunately weather and circumstances never really allowed for me to get ones similar to Shelley's BUT I was determined I was going to attempt at least one before my project needed to be completed so even though the weather was horrible on the day I tried this, this was the image I finally got from my first shoot of week 4 with my Mum and her 30yr old Stallion Naamishka.

When I took this image I asked Mum to lead Naamishka to the top of a hill and then get herself and Naamishka side on to the camera so I could see Naamishka's whole body and Mum wouldn't be blocked by Naamishka's silhouette. I then tried to expose the sky hoping that it would underexpose everything else and it did and the images came out really well. I turned the images black and white on Photoshop for a little added effect, BUT even though I couldn't get the red sky like Shelley's the images still reminded me a lot of her's which is exactly what I wanted :)

Portfolio Artist Research/Alicja Zmyslowska

Alicja Zmyslowska is a 19 yr old Polish photographer, who mainly takes images of dogs but also takes connection images between dogs and dogs and dogs and people BUT also occasionally takes images of people and other animals.

When I saw these images what really caught my attention was the colours and the background as well as the connections shown. Alicja has stated that she likes to take images of animals in different locations that best suit the situation, stating "for portraits I like to use the forest and for dog motion, I prefer more open spaces like meadows.. I have a few places in my area that I like to go shooting. Which one I choose depends on the season, weather and also on what type of pictures I want to take. 

I wasn't fully able to concentration on location and background for this weeks photographs as we don't own a horse float so I couldn't ask Mum if she wanted to drive to location and Heather doesn't own a float either, BUT I did manage to get some location shots which I was really happy with and I think match what Alicja is doing here in her images.

My Portfolio Images

Shoot 1

This and the silhouette image above were images from the first shoot I did of week 4 of my Mum and her beautiful 30yr old Arabian stallion Naamishka. I really wanted to get images of my Mum and Naamishka for this project cause if anyone is able to show true connection it's these two. My Mum owned his mother and breed Naamishka 30yrs ago and has owned him ever since and he is a really big part of our family. There hasn't been a year in my life that this horse hasn't been in. 

I wanted to attempted an image where the horse is looking more towards the camera while the owner is looking at them, Kinda like the above image of Alicja's, mainly cause a lot of the images I've taken so far have been both horse and rider focused on each other. I found it is really hard to get an image like that though, cause to get an image like that you kinda need the animal to do what you want them to do and that can be quite hard lol. Naamishaka in particular didn't want to put his ears forward or look at the camera in any way shape or form no matter how hard we tried to get him too. To finally get one like this Mum had to pick a stick up of the ground and chuck it over to where I was standing to get his attention and then I had to quickly take time image before his ears went back again, which they did not long after this photo was taken lol. He's still not fully looking straight at the camera like the dog in Alicja's image is BUT gotta work with what you get especially with animals and I quite like this image anyway. 

Shoot 2

This was my 2nd shoot I did of week 4

This shoot is of my Mum's friend Heather and her Peruvian Paso Horses Garlo the Cremello horse in the top three images.  Hera the Sooty Buckskin horse in the Middle two images, and Chana the Black Horse in the bottom two images.

For these images I was mainly just focusing on connection. I thought it was different being offered the chance to photograph different coloured horses to my previous images and also having older people in my images as well and still being able to show that same connection I had with the younger ones. I wanted a variety in horse colour and age for my portfolio so this shoot kinda worked for both, and I love the images I got :)

Shoot 3

This was my third and final shoot of week 4 and my final shoot for this portfolio.

This shoot is of Lily and her horse Mccy D and Rosa and her Horse Toa.

For this shoot I thought more about location. Originally we were going to do a shoot on Waiheke Island with amazing views in the background as Lily is from Waiheke Island but we ended up decided on Whitford Beach which is just as pretty and a really nice place to shoot on a sunny days as it was, which I think matches Alicja's images where she chooses her location to best suit the theme of her shoots.

I think if you want a location to do a shoot with a horse, the beach, a forest, stables, or a meadow are the best place to get images. so being able to do a shoot on the beach was pretty exciting :D

The contrast of colours between the horses was really good too, a lot of my shoots were taken with just a dark or just a white horse in the images so experimenting with both horses in the images was really interesting as well.