It’s all over. Officially. The certificate arrived in the post (much like the Higher one, although this one actually made it to the right address this year) and my former class mates are off onto the HND. I’ll do mine next year once I’ve worked a bit and paid off a few bills.
So I thought I’d do a bit of a collection of the different work I’ve accumulated over the year of work. So the year started with the still life unit, so there was some studio work but we went outside with lego for It’s a Small World. Then I took it further as the unit ended with the tiny model railway people re-enacting Hands, Face, Space. Some of the other work from the Still Life unit appeared in my more general Autumn post. New year, new lockdown and we did most of Portraiture in our own homes and I ran a little short on models. The final term was Documentary photography and my final project was Unsafe Spaces. In which I discovered that Photoshop could really use a spell checker function. The Applied Photography unit showed that there was more than just taking photos… The infrared or ultra violet were pretty different although quite easy to do on a basic scale. A more practical application of the infrared was the trail camera. Watching Indy at night wasn’t exactly riveting but it was something I wanted to try for a long time. Finally there was an accumulation of work in an over haul of the Portfolio and the way this site looks.
So it’s just a matter of wait and earn… and hope they let me back in next year…..
Cast your mind back to school, science class to be exact, because we’re going to be looking at the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Don’t want to go there? It’s ok ‘cos I’m explaining it anyway. The spectrum is all of the different types of sources of electromagnetic radiation stacked together by wavelength and frequency.
So it contains gamma radiation, x rays, microwave and radio. Wedged in there is the visible light, the stuff we normally choose point cameras at. While we are still in our mental classroom remember that old phrase they used to trot out? Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain? It’s the order of the colours in the visible light spectrum with violet hanging out at one end and red at the other, this is where we’re headed off to with this experiment.
Infrared photography is really popular at the moment. There’s plenty of strange white trees and dark skies on Instagram. There’s over 200,000 uses of the hashtag #infraredphotography on Insta, it’s a feed full of the most amazing images. Of course, this technique also how some cameras work in the dark, like the trail camera I was playing with only last week. That’s a super useful feature on security and CCTV systems. There’s a few different ways of getting in on the infrared art trend. You can get an older DSLR camera altered to remove the inbuilt infrared filtering system (you can do it yourself if you are brave/stupid). There’s infrared film, if you are into that. You can get yourself an infrared filter and try it that way on your camera. Or there’s a shortcut if you get a filter and a camera phone.
You just hold the filter over the lens on the phone and take a photo on a bright day. It’s going to come out all red but a little in phone edit to convert the image to black and white at it’s done. That’s how the 2 images above with trees were created. The one of the buildings and the city street? That was the same filter on my DSLR but it’s just not as impressive in an urban environment.
So at the other end of the spectrum, literally in this case, is ultraviolet. You can get yourself a converted camera to shoot in UV, it’s the same as the infrared conversion but it becomes “full spectrum”. There’s some other kit you might need to pick up as well. This is probably a route folk would go down if you are serious or in dermatology. It shows up skin damage as UV light is what is responsible for your fine sun tan, or your daft sun burn, or your very worrying skin cancer. Fun fact – if you put on sun block and take a shot of your face it would look like you had put paint on it because it’s blocking the UV. Still we can have some fun with this without a load of kit and expense.
I worked in the USA at a summer camp back in 2009 and this is in an expired passport…. Would you allow this woman to look after your child?
So if you get yourself a black light (yup, just like in the clubs or on CSI – I’m showing my age here) then you can make the most amazing things show up. Just block out most of the light so they become really bright. In other words, shoot in the dark. So money, driving licences, passports, etc all have security protection using different methods. One is to have a printed layer that would normally be invisible to the naked eye over it. When the document is checked with a black light there’s a chance that a fraudster would not have gone to the bother of creating this design as well. This one surprised me as I assumed it would not be in the same chance of being copied as a passport itself. The passport it is in was before the biometric era and was rather boring under UV light. The biometric passport I have now is fascinating, there’s a different animal on every page. Those images are taking a little longer to edit as I don’t want to share my passport number or any details on the internet for all to see. When you get bored of looking at all the bank notes you can find… there’s the world of UV makeup that makes for fab fashion images (if you find someone more skilled at applying makeup than me, obviously).
So did you survive your trip back to science class? Was it worth it? It’s completely worth giving it a try. I’ll probably be giving infrared a few more goes.
So I’ve made jokes about my lack of skills in the wildlife photography department… Very occasionally I get a little luck, like ol’ Jazz Hands here. But as part of my HNC I got to play with a proper trail camera, like someone who really tracks down animals and not just hopes that a heron will stick their landing in front of me.
Jazz Hands!!
It was actually a lot of fun to play with (and I’ll be honest here it was playing). I don’t have any real animal tracking skills and I don’t own the trail camera, so decided to put it where it wouldn’t be stolen and where I know there’s an animal to capture…. So it was placed in Indy’s stable to capture her movement overnight and it worked.
Here she is! I never catch her sleeping so this is really a bit of a treat.
So here’s some hard facts – it’s a Spypoint Force Dark Trail Camera and if you want to buy one Wex is charging £149 (at time of me writing anyway). This model can take photos, video and time lapse both in the dark, using infrared, and in colour. It has a 12 megapixel sensor and is “weather proof” (so I wouldn’t dunk it in the river). It takes a whopping 8 (eight) AA batteries (unless you can put your hands on a rechargeable battery unit for it but that will set you back about £65). However, it does have decent battery life for those 8 AAs. I used some bargain Kodak labled ones and got 4 full 18 hour stints out of them and they were only at 50%. In each of those nights there were about 650 images. This seems OK by my standards and matches what is stated on the websites for it surviving 7 days out in the wild.
I suppose that this isn’t the mose exciting use but I don’t know of any badger setts to stalk. I do know where some deer usually pass through for food but didn’t have long enough to trial that one out as an idea. Maybe next time.
I have a sort of existential dread and cold sweat that comes over me when I think about telling models (or indeed the poor friends and family) that end up in front of my camera what to do. So when portraiture came up in the course there was a little panic. This is probably the only time the coronavirus has been helpful as I could mostly work with people I knew to get the work done.
Clockwise from top left – With a Precious Object, Through Glass, Without a Face, Self-portrait in the Style of an Artist (Picasso in this case) and With Movement.
My poor mother… She hasn’t quite gotten over the shame of wandering round the building we’ve not long moved to dressed in my Harry Potter cosplay robe. Each of these images had briefs of their own. The self portrait is built of 6 different images and was almost a bit of a cheat. I didn’t want to turn my camera on myself directly, at that time anyway, so built it out of old selfies. The thing is I can take good shots of people if they don’t know it.
Clockwise from top left – Work from my Higher at the Christmas Style Mile Carnival and the SEC Craft Fair, a shot from the night photography workshop in Edinburgh and my personal favourite, The Shoe Seller in Tenerife.
None of these were posed…..And I almost prefer these to formal, posed images. Heck “The Shoe Seller” is a bit of a portfolio fixture at this point. I accept that there’s a definite need for images that are posed. It’s maybe just not my thing just now. Need to work on it though because I’ll need to do a studio shoot or two when I get back into the college buildings.
The final creative project for my still life unit in college. A recreation of the government’s Covid-19 advice graphic using my favourite tiny railway model people.
Hands – Hand sanitiser swimming pool complete with Baywatch lifeguard. Face – A discarded face mask ski slope. Has various levels of difficulty. Space – Get your health and safety signage painted by our elite crew of painters. Don’t worry they do clean up after themselves.
All done as set ups on my desk top. It’s one of the easiest things to do. The fight I had with photoshop at 1am to put the work together however…..
I’m missing the gold and orange tones of autumn already, as we start the downhill slide into winter and the festive season.
Meanwhile college continues on both in and outside. The studio is fun and I wish I could spend more time there but we’re out here dodging a virus….
I don’t normally get to play with flash but there’s actually a whole world out there waiting to be manipulated with light. But back to why we are actually here……
Some natural light. Autumnal colour and life is out there. It’s been a kind season for my photos. I miss going roung museums and the city catching people but they are all in hiding. So I am fungi hunting and looking for interesting nature while walking in the local park. My back needs a break from my camera bag though. Hopefully Santa will bring me one with decent shoulder straps and enough space.
Lucky in love? Seal it with a padlock. It’s an odd tradition that started in the real city of love, Paris, and can be found almost anywhere now.
Today’s college project. Learned that the model train figues are a little too small to be taken outside into the wild. I’ll probably keep them to desktop set ups where they can be carefully placed and secured. But lego figures…. now there’s a scale that works well in the wild.
I had completely forgotten about this image till I was reminded this morning. Taken as part of my Higher work at the craft fair in the SEC. It didn’t fit in with my theme so was left to gather dust.
So I went out to the recently reopened Riverside museum and it was abit of an exerience compaired to the last time I was there in late November 2019 (all of 8 months ago). Last time it was teeming with people as you can see in the photos I took for my Higher Project. Of course, I was also there for fun when I wrote this post all about it in March 2019.
If you had told me back in March, or even November, that it would have about a third of the usual number inside, no cafe, no museum shop, and that you would need to book in advance…. well I would probably have laughed.
It really is a whole different world to the one that shut up shop in March this year.
Meanwhile, out on the streets….. I had a meet up with some of the guys from my Higher class and we had a bit of a walk about. It’s always good to get out and see other humans these days
In a decision that I made what seems like many moons ago, really it was only last year, I started studying at night school for my Higher. The work builds up into a year-long project and an exam. Of course covid-19 stepped in and the exam was cancelled, so I have no idea how that would have worked out. The project, however, is half finished and the photos mostly unshared. I kept the photos quiet while I was working but it’s time to share what I did work on.
So it was called People Make Glasgow…. Oh that sounds familiar, you say? Yes, I’ll admit it was a shameless theft of the toursim catchphrase. It did give rise to an interesting set of images as I went out to find “people”. I didn’t manage to get the final set of images so I’ll share some for my favourites from the shoots I did manage to complete. The whole project was about 2 shoots short of a full set.
2 of the shoots were attempts at street photography. The city centre at night – Halloween night to be exact, and Pollok Park and SEC craft fair. I got quite into these shoots.
The next shoot was a marathon of a single day. Riverside Museum in the morning and the Style Mile Christmas Carnival in the afternoon. This yielded a lot of images and a fair few that would probably have made it into the final line up. It was brilliant trying to catch images as the parade went past in manual mode, that was a challenge.
Over the month of December I centred on the Christmas markets in George Square. It was a challenge to get images handheld in the darkness.
My mojo kinda left me after Christmas for a bit and the next thing the world had changed from under us. I took my camera with me to work at an office in the city centre for the final week before the lockdown started. Then it was empty streets and lines outside supermarkets and pharmacies. For a project that had people at heart it got very complicated.
Eventually word came through that we wouldn’t be submitting anything of the project for external assessment. So it has been gatering dust since.
The results arrived last week under a storm of issues. The SQA were taking the teachers/tutors grades and downgrading some of them based on the outcomes of the place where you studied. I got very lucky, my grade remained what my tutor submitted. I got an A.
Selkie’s Photography 