ARD 604 Creative Futures: Personal Work 2013 - 14

Creative Futures - Personal Work

Focus Wales 2013

The Focus Wales Music Festival and Conference which took place in Wrexham during April 2013 was one of the most exciting events I have had the opportunity to document on behalf of the North Wales Film & Photography Collective. We were invited to cover the festival by the organisers, Rampant Dragon. It was held over four days across multiple venues and encompassed musical performances, seminars and conferences. 

Organising the film crews and photographers was a mammoth undertaking, but one so well-managed by the Collective administration that everything ran fairly smoothly and according to plan.  This was initially achieved by the creation of a large, hand-drawn chart covering the best part of a wall in our office space at NWSAD.  Each Focus event was listed on this chart in order, together with the venue, the times and the names of those students who would be recording it.  All participating members were then given a slip of paper on which their assignments were written and personal reminders were additionally sent out the day before each event from our private Facebook Group.  Using the Facebook Group meant that members could be easily informed of any last moment changes of plan.

The first event that I attended was a performance of song and poetry performed by local artists which took place from late afternoon until early evening at the Royal Oak pub in Wrexham. Having not been inside this venue before, I visited a couple of days beforehand to introduce myself to the staff - who were very friendly and helpful - and to observe where the bands would be working in order to anticipate any problems I might encounter when photographing them.  

The bar was exceptionally long and narrow and the tiny area occupied by the performers was backed by a window through which bright sunlight streamed.  It was clear that I was going to encounter difficulty photographing this event well even using manual settings, because either the back-lit performers would appear in silhouette or, if I metered for the artists, the background would be completely overblown.  One way to get around this would be to make use of my camera's built-in flash but I wanted to avoid using it, because not only would it be distracting for both the performers and the audience in such a small space but it would additionally 'flatten' everything out and cast harsh, unflattering shadows on the artists' faces.  Back home that evening I practised with manual settings and evaluative metering and experimented with the effects obtained by taping a small external diffusing hood to the top of my camera's built-in flash unit to soften the harshness of the flash bulb.  It helped to reduce it a little, but not as much as I had hoped.

I arrived early on the day of the performance and set up.  As suspected, even with manual settings my images did not turn out nearly as well as I would have liked, but with a little post-production work in Adobe Photoshop I was able to bring most of them up to an acceptable level.  Although the external diffusing hood slightly reduced the harshness of the few flash shots that I took, they were still too bright and consequently lacking in atmosphere.  A few days later I saw the clear and perfectly lit images taken at this same event by Senior Photography Lecturer Stewart Edwards and asked him how he had obtained them under such difficult lighting circumstances.  He explained that he had been using an external flash and had bounced the light off the ceiling, which illuminated his subjects whilst creating a much softer and more diffused quality of light than could be obtained with a direct flash.  This item of equipment is obviously essential and I intend to obtain one as soon as I am able.

A poetry performance at the Royal Oak

Song performance at the Royal Oak

 

Singer and Accordion Player at the Royal Oak

My next assignment for Focus Wales was to photograph the speakers at four consecutive conferences taking place the following morning in the Catrin Finch Centre on the Plas Coch Glyndwr University campus.  The first of these speakers was Paul Gray of the Cardiff Branch of the Musician's Union, whose solo presentation on the benefits of MU membership was so interesting and informative that I bought my musician son an MU membership for his birthday the following week!  At the end of his lecture, Mr Gray asked if I could send my photographs of his presentation to him that night, so that they could be used for MU publicity the following day.  Having obtained the go-ahead to do so from organisers Rampant Dragon, I spent the evening editing the images, finally emailing them at 4am.  Mr Gray emailed me a few hours later to express his thanks and said he was very pleased with them.

Mr Gray's lecture was followed by three conferences on various topics relevant to the current state of the music industry.  The panellists sat behind a long table placed at the front of the auditorium to discuss the issues and take questions from the floor.  These events were difficult to photograph well without disrupting the proceedings by climbing over members of the audience or standing on vacant seats to obtain good shots.  Obviously I couldn't do this, so I sat quietly at the front and occasionally to the side, zooming in to get the best images I could and trying meanwhile to capture the individual personalities of those present.  All of the shots from my eye-level showed the panellists bisected by the table at the level of their tummies, an untidy dark jumble of legs and feet below.  Back home I cropped these pictures to remove much of their lower halves.  When a Collective member filming the proceedings was called away to attend a family emergency, I also took over videoing two of these conferences, using a static camera positioned at the back of the auditorium.  

Speakers at one of the conferences in the Catrin Finch Centre

Later that afternoon, three bands put on great performances in the Catrin Finch Foyer: The Goat Roper Rodeo Band, The Bluebottle Veins and Glyndwr's very own Sparrowhawks.  After being confined to one or two spots in the auditorium for so long, it was lovely to be able to move around the bands as they worked, grabbing shots from floor-level or from the top of a table and I was pleased with the images captured. 

Live performance in the Catrin Finch Foyer

At 5pm I made my way across town to The Bank Wine Bar (near to St Giles Church) where a selection of Korean rock bands were due to perform.  I had taken the precaution of buying some earplugs beforehand and I was very grateful for them once the music began since even with them in place the noise-levels were uncomfortable.  Of all the events I covered for Focus Wales my images from The Bank are the most successful.  The early evening light filtering through the high windows combined beautifully with the interior lighting and predominantly black decor of the bar, enabling me to capture the intimate atmosphere of the venue with ease.  The performers themselves were so expressive that the majority of my shots from this event needed very little post production work.  

Whilst there, I also videoed one of their songs to provide the Collective with the option to add a clip of the band's performance to a compilation video that we had discussed creating at a meeting the week before.  I was filming hand-held and towards the end of this song began to feel like my arms were going to drop off; glancing at my watch I realised the song had continued for sixteen minutes and was showing no signs of ending!  

Korean Rock at the Bank

Drummer at The Bank

I placed all of my completed work from these two days onto a DVD and handed it in to Dave Grey of Rampant Dragon within four days of shooting.  A small selection of shots from this event can be found on my 'Infinite Sky Photography' Flickr page.

In addition to my film and photography work for Focus Wales, I also edited a video of Charlotte Church's performance - using clips obtained by the two people who'd been permitted by Ms Church to cover this event - for the Collective's compilation DVD.  Although the sound quality was poor on these recordings because of distortions resulting from the massive sound levels in the venue, I really enjoyed putting this together and the resulting film was well received. 

The Focus Wales Festival and Music Conference was a wonderful experience, it provided a rare opportunity to gain direct experience of event coverage and I learned an enormous amount from participating. I felt extremely fortunate to be a member of the official press team covering such a prestigious event and also very conscious of my position as an ambassador for the Collective, NWSAD and Glyndwr University.  The thorough way in which the Collective had organised its membership of over thirty students into teams of one or more for smaller venues and two or more for the larger ones ensured that all the events were well documented by film-makers and photographers and Rampant Dragon were very pleased with the quality of the work that we had provided for them.

This was the first time that I had covered live musical events and through photographing many different types of performance I quickly became familiar with the types of shots to look for, learning to kneel, twist and bend and to move quickly around the room in order to capture the artists from viewpoints that best expressed their performance.  Trying to convey the emotion of the performance together with the atmosphere of the venue presented some difficulty until I realised that the key to both lay in the way the stage was lit.  By observing the position of the light - both natural and artificial - the photographer can add drama and emotional nuance to the still image, evoking much of the passion of the original performance.

The event I found the most difficult to photograph was the very first one at the Royal Oak because of my lack of external flash equipment - this is a matter I hope to remedy in the near future.  By contrast, the moody lighting and dramatic performances at The Bank yielded my most successful images in terms of composition and drama.  

The North Wales Film & Photography Collective Retrospective Exhibition

Over the summer of 2013, in an initiative to transform empty shops into community arts spaces, Dave Grey from The Foundry and Mike Jones of the collaborative Arts organisation THIS Project have turned the former JJBSports shop in Regent Street, Wrexham into UnDegUn, a public gallery bordered by studio space for working artists.  The gallery was officially launched in September of this year and their first exhibition featured paintings by Fine Art graduates of the North Wales School of Art & Design.

The space within the old shop itself is vast and behind this area, Film & Photography graduates Sue McGrane, Paul Lowndes and Holly Cooper have set up their new photographic business and commercial studio, known as The Collective Imagery Studio.  The North Wales Film & Photography Collective having now become a commercial venture for its founders, the dynamics within the Collective itself have changed and although work experience will still be available to current students at NWSAD through the Collective, we are all aware that it will be organised and run in a way that is very different to last year when we were all still students together and sharing the same studio space.

The next exhibition to follow that of the Fine Arts graduates was set to be a retrospective of the North Wales Film & Photography Collective's work during the previous year and upon my return to Wrexham in September I set about assisting Sue, Paul and Holly to prepare the gallery space in advance.  Since it was important for their professional photographic studio to be up and running in time for the exhibition Open Evening, it was necessary for them to first build studio spaces along the far side of the gallery in order to accommodate the displaced artists who would be vacating the area at the back of the gallery needed for the photographic studio.

Initially I could do little to help beyond supporting the enormous wooden partitions that Paul, Sue and Holly were joining together and occasionally poking cable ties through holes as instructed.  Once this task was completed and the photographic studio had been set up, we then spent several days cleaning and preparing the gallery, whilst Senior Lecturer Stewart Edwards began to print out photographs that Collective members had provided.  Unfortunately, despite frequent requests to all of the Collective members to submit at least one or two photographs, only around half submitted images to be printed, so although we had plenty of work for the exhibition, some of our members were not actually represented, which was a shame.  The evening before the exhibition we laid all of the prints in the folder that Stewart had made for us and placed heavy furniture on top to flatten them out overnight.

On the day of the exhibition, Sue, Holly and Paul put the finishing touches to their wonderful new studio whilst UnDegUn volunteer Matty cut strips of velcro into squares to attach the prints to the walls.  I meanwhile laid the images on the floor beneath the walls and pillars, placing many of the photographs of children around the central pillars, since this is the area where most of the children who come into the gallery like to play while their parents relax on the sofas.  I thought the little ones might relate to these images more easily than the photographs of adult musicians.  I felt that it was important for us to avoid creating the 'frieze' effect familiar to the long narrow corridors of educational buildings and I also wanted to group the images by mood, colour and energy rather than subject matter or date, in order to create a broad overview of both our work and the sheer wealth of events on offer within Wrexham itself.

Hanging the exhibition

It was a difficult space to hang because the walls and supporting square pillars are clad with white melamine strips separated by silver recesses (presumably to suspend stock from) which creates a very noisy, stripy background for any image.  The back wall meanwhile is covered in strips of mirror which - being slightly distorted - creates an interesting surface but one unsuitable for hanging artwork because of the distracting reflections.  By placing the black and white prints on the most challenging of these walls however we were able to overcome some of the difficulties presented by the background.

One of the finished walls showing the breadth of work and events undertaken by the Collective

By lunchtime the studio was finished and former Collective member Beckah Hornsey arrived with the last of the prints.  Everyone pitched in and within a couple of hours all the photographs were hung.  We left in the late afternoon to prepare for the evening ahead. When I returned at half-past six, a small crowd had already gathered outside and the musicians who had kindly offered their services for free for the Private View were setting up in the gallery itself, in front of the unused mirrored section of wall.  Our work looked impressive on the gallery walls and I felt very proud to be a part of the Collective.

The Mayor Councillor David Bithell and Mayoress Mrs Virginia Bithell arrived to launch the show and were very friendly and supportive of the work.  Senior Photography Lecturer Stewart Edwards also gave a small speech, as did a visiting member of the council who announced that the organisers of UnDegUn - Mike Jones and Dave Grey of The Foundry - were in line to receive an award in recognition of all their hard work to provide a Community Arts Space for the people of Wrexham. The gallery soon filled up and the band - Tiny Wooden Angels - put on a wonderful performance.

It was a really lovely evening to be a part of and I enjoyed being given the opportunity to put my organisational skills to good use during the setting up of the show and to practice my photography during the Private View.  During the course of the evening I was able to do a little networking as well, which was an added bonus as it stood me in good stead when I next encountered an event at which those persons were present.

Although I would have liked more Collective members to have submitted work for this exhibition - since the team had covered a multitude of events during the course of the previous year and not every event was covered - the exhibition itself proved popular and successful, raising the profile not just of the Collective but also of Rampant Dragon, the company that had been responsible for organising many of the events depicted around the walls.

Senior Animation Lecturer Marisse Mari chats with guests during the evening

Dave Grey delivers a speech to open the exhibition

Senior Photography Lecturer Stewart Edwards give short speeches to the guests

 

 

 Guests and helpers enjoy the evening

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

FADO

On the evening of Saturday 26th October - two days after the launch of the exhibition above - I was booked to cover the Portuguese Speaking Community of Wrexham's Opening Ceremony and Portuguese Cultural Evening 'FADO', which was being held in the Wrexham Memorial Hall.  As I had never been in this building, I made a point of calling in on my way home the day before the event in order to check what the lighting and space was like and to introduce myself to the people who work there.  The room where the function was to be held was long and airy with interesting lighting - clusters of clear glass globes suspended by rods from the high ceiling.  The bulbs were fluorescent, yet gave off a strange yellowish light. The stage is very high but I was given permission to stand on a chair to get my shots.  Even so, I could see that it was going to be difficult to get the camera sufficiently high.  Back home I practised using the manual settings on my camera to get optimal low light images with the correct white balance without ramping up the ISO and thereby introducing noise and grain into the pictures. 

The following evening I made my way to the Memorial Hall, introduced myself to the event organisers and obtained signed consent forms from the parents of all but one of the children attending the event, all of whom would be entertained in an adjoining room whilst the adults dined in the main area.  Joey Edwards was on video and we found a corner out of the way of the guests where we could safely stash our equipment.  It quickly became clear that I would be unable to stand on a chair to take photographs since this would block the audience's view, so I spent some time hunting around the wings of the stage for vantage points instead.

Over the course of the next 90 minutes the hall gradually filled with families and after everyone was seated the event began with introductions from the organisers CPLW Chairperson Iolanda Banu Viegas and her assistants Raquel Parker and Andreia John, followed by a short speech from the Mayor of Wrexham David Bithell and another from our local MP, Ian Lucas.

The first act onstage was entitled 'A Darker Shade of Fado' and featured singer and dancer Nuno Silva accompanied by musician Sabio Janiak and dancers Simone Muller Lotz and Chihiro Kawasaki.  Their performance was mesmerising and calling on experience gained during my coverage of events for Focus Wales, I managed to obtain quite a few shots of the dancers.  I captured them with motion blur because I was using a tripod due to the low light conditions and when converted to black and white, the images do convey the dark, dramatic mood of their work.

Nuno Silva and Dancers

Fado Dancers

Fado Dancers

After a break for the audience to eat their buffet meal, the event continued with fado songs performed in a more traditional style by Jose Ribiero, Alice Cunha, Daniel Oliviera and Lino Miguel. The evening was rounded off by a raffle, further speeches and the ceremonial cutting of a cake made and decorated for the occasion.

I tried to capture a little of everything that night - especially the atmosphere - and the images came in at a slightly shocking 826 RAW files.  After whittling these down to the 130 most usable photographs I processed seven key images for press release, processing them in Adobe Photoshop ahead of the others in order to get them out as quickly as possible.  The most difficult aspect of this was adjusting the white balance because the strange lighting in the venue had thrown these values out of kilter.  Additionally, one of the ladies in the best shot of two with the Mayor had closed one of her eyelids at the exact moment that the photograph was taken and I had to clone and reverse her other eye in order to correct this.  The seven final publicity images included group shots that featured the Mayor and Mayoress, two group shots that included MP Ian Lucas, a stage shot of the organisers with the children and close-ups of the performers and of the cake.  These I emailed to the Wrexham Leader, Wrexham.com and CLPW Chairperson Iolanda who asked for permission to send them to the press back in Portugal.  The screenshot below shows a page from the Portuguese newspaper report featuring my images.

Iolanda Banu Viegas, Andreia John and Mayor of Wrexham David Bithell

Iolanda Banu Viegas, Mayor and Mayoress of Wrexham and MP Ian Lucas

Nuno Silva and Dancers

Performance of traditional Fado

I spent the rest of the weekend processing the remaining images.  This took longer than expected because the temperature of the lighting on the stage conflicted with that in the hall, completely throwing my white balance off course, even though I had reset it several times during the evening.  As I had made little use of flash (not having the kind one can bounce off a white surface, only the harsh kind that makes people look terrible) all of the images taken that night had a strong bilious deep yellow cast and it was necessary to set a custom balance for each image in Adobe Photoshop's Camera Raw, ranging anywhere from between 2550 to 3850 depending on where the subjects had been positioned in relation to the lights.

Additionally, one of the mothers at the event had expressly said that she did not want her young daughter's face photographed.  Of course, the little girl concerned turned out to be a real extrovert who wanted to be in the front row of every photograph!  Knowing that the child might feel disappointed to be the only person whose face was excluded from these images, I had chatted with her mother at the end of the evening and learned that the objection actually came from the girl's father.  Whilst processing the images I therefore duplicated every picture in which she appeared and blurred out her features in one of them. The parents could then discuss with Iolanda what they wanted to do after having viewed both versions for themselves.

Once the images were ready I burnt them to DVD for Iolanda with an additional copy for Joey, who then put together a media DVD of the event for customers to buy for £4 each, the proceeds from which were shared equally between ourselves and the CLPW. Iolanda sold 50 copies of this DVD in all, so - after overheads were taken off - Joey and I had a nice little reward for our work just in time for Christmas!

I uploaded a few of the images to my Facebook photography page, sending a link to Iolanda who then used several of them on her CLPW page as a taster to stimulate interest in buying the media DVD:

I also linked up on Facebook with Fado singer and dancer Nuno Silva and musician Lino Miguel, both of whom had complimented me on my photographs of them.  Mr Miguel in particular messaged me to say that it was rare for him to encounter photographs of himself that he liked and requested to use the image of him on his Facebook Official Music Page.  Together with Nuno's dancers, I offered them the opportunity to use these photographs for their personal publicity at no charge, provided they accredit me as the photographer.  The reason for doing this was to obtain free publicity for my work amongst a wider audience than I would normally reach, with the hope that it might also generate more work for me in the future.  Nuno, Lino and the dancers were really pleased and I see they are already using some of the images for their own publicity.  A further selection of images from this event may be viewed on the FADO album on my Infinite Sky Productions Facebook Page.

I was so happy to have been given the opportunity to photograph this event and to collaborate with Joey in the production of the DVD afterwards; I feel that the subsequent publication of my images, both here in Wrexham and abroad, online and on DVD, has raised my professional profile a great deal.

The images taken of the dancers were the most successful of the night and I would like in the future to photograph other dancers using the technique of motion blur in order to investigate more deeply what can be achieved.  To obtain these shots I had to climb the steps at the side of the stage during the performance in full view of the audience and set up in the wings.  Just a few months ago I would have probably felt too nervous to do this but thanks to my experiences covering Focus Wales I had the confidence to identify the location from which I would obtain the best shots and then place myself there.

Looking back on my images of the Mayor standing together with the event organisers, I now realise that I should have insisted on their posing for a little longer in each setting to enable me to take around six shots each time, since details such as momentarily closed eyelids are not always visible at the time of capture and such things are time consuming to rectify in post production.



'THIS Project' Wrexham Zombie Walk 

The next event to take place at UnDegUn was a 'Zombie Walk' scheduled for the afternoon of Halloween.  The plan was for make-up artists to come into UnDegUn during the early part of the afternoon to transform anyone who wanted to participate into a zombie, after which a public walk would be undertaken by all the zombies, starting from Regent Street and ending at the Eagles Meadow Retail Centre. Members of the Collective Imagery Studio would be on hand to take 'formal' portraits of the finished zombies and all of the photographs - both those taken within the studio and those taken in the gallery area by photographers like me - would be available on the Collective Imagery Studio website for the event-goers to buy.  The photographers were therefore the first to receive the make-up and took on the role of the zombie paparazzi.

Collective Imagery Studio Founders Sue McGrane and Paul Lowndes

Videographer Joey Edwards

Freelance Photographer Michael Greaney

Despite the fact that many people were away from the town centre due to having already made plans for Halloween, a good number of participants did arrive and the make-up artists set to work.  They applied a kind of theatrical white latex to everyone's faces and then overlaid this with fake blood and bruising.  Some women were initially put off by the thought that this might cause their skin to have an allergic reaction but I was able to reassure them that since mine hadn't reacted badly - beyond a bit of itching from the contraction of the dried latex - they could probably go ahead with impunity.  While their make-up was being applied I walked about the gallery space taking photographs.

Make up artists apply the latex face-paints to members of the public

I think this is probably the first time I've been able to photograph members of the public without them exhibiting any self-consciousness or shyness, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Undergoing transformation

A zombiefied Dave Grey

By 4pm dusk was beginning to fall and everyone was finally ready to undertake the walk.  Accompanied by Joey Edwards on video and Paul and Sue on camera, I positioned myself in the street outside the gallery, waiting for the zombies to emerge from behind the closed steel door.  They began to beat horribly on the rattling metal from the inside, attracting lots of curiosity (and some fear) from passers by, many of whom stopped to watch as the zombies began to stagger out as the door was slowly raised.

I expected them to lurch along quite slowly, but unfortunately the young lads at the front set off at a fast jog and everyone else began rushing to keep up with them.  This meant that I was trying to photograph them in poor light whilst running backwards, downhill, along a crowded street.  My photographs were blurred and very disappointing; even those I tried using rapid fire multiple exposure settings and the 'sports setting' on my camera were dark and shaky.  It wasn't until the zombies slowed down and gathered together at Eagles Meadow that I was able to capture any decent shots.

Slowing down at Eagles Meadow

A group shot of the zombies

A group shot of the zombies

Over the weekend I processed the images and put around eighty on a DVD to be uploaded to the Collective Imagery Studio website for purchase by those who had participated.

This event was a lot of fun to cover and I really enjoyed taking part, although I was not happy with my images from the run.  I am now aware that I need to learn exactly what kinds of settings to use for this kind of rapid movement, since the ones I thought would work - multiple shots or the sports setting - were still not fast enough to capture the activity in the poor light.

It was a pleasant change for me to be in an environment where everyone present was eager to have their picture taken and I was moderately pleased with the images captured in the gallery space, despite the harsh overhead fluorescent lighting and the tendency of my lens tends to distort the middle distance horizontals and verticals.  Looking back on this event I think that given the opportunity to cover it again I would set up a plain background sheet of some kind against which people could be photographed quickly and informally, thus eliminating the confusing geometry of the former shop walls.  Doing so would not impinge on the more formally posed individual and group portraits being taken in the Collective Imagery Studio behind the gallery since I would not be using themed props or studio lighting as they do, on the contrary it might even encourage people to visit the studio. 



Personal Development Planning and Related Projects

Once I graduate, I will be concentrating on the development of the fine art aspect of my photography, as a natural progression from my previous occupation as a painter. Over the course of the next year I will be putting together a website and a series of online portfolios of work for sale and I also hope in the near future to undertake a Masters Degree in Fine Art Photography, for which I will be compiling a separate portfolio.

In addition to the events detailed earlier in this journal post, I have therefore also been working on a number of personal photographic projects throughout the year, some examples of which can be viewed on my Facebook Infinite Sky Productions Page and on my Flickr Infinite Sky Photography Page.  These images comprise brief selections from some of the genres of subject matter that I am currently exploring, such as night photography, landscapes and waterscapes, macro work, investigation of reflective and transparent surfaces and the documentation of abandoned spaces and the process of decay.  Many of these themes are interconnected (as illustrated in the spidergram below) and as these collections grow, the cohesion between them will become more apparent. 



The range of subjects that I am working on is purposefully broad in order to encompass the more commercially viable aspects of online photography sales such as landscapes and attractive still life studies; a quick glance at the top-selling images on photographic print sites such as Photo4me and 500pixels will confirm that these types of images are, understandably, the most popular.  I foresee no problem expressing myself as a photographic artist across a wide spectrum of subjects, although I am aware that it may become necessary at some point in the future to establish a separate online identity for commercial sales as distinct from fine art work, since I would prefer to avoid the restrictions that can result from being stereotyped by a particular photographic genre. 

Undertaking these collections has assisted me in the honing of my photographic skills and enabled me to clarify my message as an artist.  Although I still have some way to go, I feel far more confident with my camera now and have found that even when not working, I am looking at the world differently these days, as if through a lens.  It is an entirely different way of seeing compared to the view I had just three years ago at the beginning of my course and one that allows me to focus exclusively on the way light falls on a subject and how this affects its relationship with its surroundings and gives it meaning.  I am also no longer afraid to take photographic risks and try out new ideas in the quest to convey the essence of what I perceive.

  
'Windfalls'

An example of one such project from these collections - that I hope to feature in my final exhibition - has been to capture images of the windfalls at the back of my shared student house in Wrexham.  A cooking apple tree grows in the centre of the paved backyard and following last year's bumper crop, a large quantity of fruit remained on the ground throughout the winter, providing food for the birds who seem to prefer them to birdseed when the weather is harsh.

Most of these apples remained yellowish green from November right through until the beginning of February, but toward the end of the latter I noticed that the process of rot was under way and as I am recording the decay of abandoned spaces and objects, I photographed them twice during March 2014.

My first session with the apples - at the beginning of the month - yielded some interesting results.  I could see, for example, that the images worked better when the sun was shining - bringing out the warm tones in the skins of the fruit - and in groups and from close up, rather than singly or from a distance. 

Apples at the beginning of March

Intrigued by the possibilities this subject matter could offer, I decided that for my second session I would try to get as close as possible to the fruit to capture more detail.  This presented some difficulties; I do not have a macro lens and positioning my 18-35mm kit lens close to any subject creates a very small depth of field.  Additionally I wanted to make use of a recently acquired set of 'macro filters' - basic magnifying filters which fit on to the end of the lens - and these too distort a photograph, producing a shallow depth of field with a defocussed foreground, a mild bowl-like effect throughout the whole image and colour aberrations that increase toward an image's periphery.  Rather than struggle against such effects however I decided to use them to my advantage and incorporate them into the composition, cropping out any weak areas during post processing.

Due to incessant rain, the opportunity to photograph the apples in the soft golden light that I intended did not come about for nearly three weeks.  After a rainy month of milder temperatures, the backyard apples had decayed quite rapidly by the time of my second session at the end of March and now presented a far wider variation in terms of hue, texture and size; whilst some still retained the outward appearance of apples - albeit quite mottled - others had withered and shrunk until they looked almost like fir-cones and the remainder had succumbed to so many moulds and yeasts that they were like puree inside.

Apples from Second Session

Apples from Second Session

Apples from Second Session

Without disturbing their natural arrangement too much, I spent around three hours capturing images of these fruit and after processing the photographs found quite a few that I was pleased with.

Apple from Second Session

Apples from Second Session

Apples from Second Session

Following a tutorial with Senior Photography Lecturer Stewart Edwards, I reworked several of these images in Adobe Photoshop from their original RAW files using techniques recently learned from technical demonstrator Dave Kelly and will be including printed versions of them in my final show as part of my public portfolio of work.

I was pleased with the images from these two shoots and feel they are a positive addition to my collections of abandoned objects and spaces.  Many of the images came out exactly as planned, accurately conveying the differing textures and colours of the fruit, the mellow light producing the exact kind of luminosity around them that I had hoped for.  In the future I hope to acquire a proper macro lens and revisiting such a subject with this equipment will be very exciting.

Having completed post production on these images I uploaded several of them to my Infinite Sky Photography page on Flickr and Infinite Sky Productions Page on Facebook.  I found it interesting that although they have been viewed many times, at the time of writing no-one has actually 'liked' them on the Facebook Page, presumably because they found the subject matter unpleasant.  I am neither surprised nor disappointed by this. I believe that it is part of my journey as a storyteller to challenge preconceived notions about photographic art, but the 'likes' for the generic sunsets I posted at exactly the same time confirms my suspicion that at a commercial level I will probably have to cater to two different audiences at some point in the future.

The viewer of these images might find the subject matter slightly repugnant but the transition these apples are undergoing is part of their natural cycle and whilst working with them I was struck by how gently they are making the slow journey back into the earth.  Although they no longer provide food for people, they nevertheless nourish a myriad of organisms and these windfalls will eventually feed the very soil from which the parent tree will raise another crop of apples, for the students who come after me to this house to enjoy.

Evaluation

This has been an exciting year for me in photography, filled with unexpected opportunities to develop my craft and take on new challenges.  I began the summer of 2013 still feeling somewhat shy when photographing public events, but with the support of my tutors and fellow members of the Collective I have found my confidence and now feel ready to take on the world with my camera.

During the course of this year both my compositional and post production skills have improved as I gained a deeper understanding of the elements that make a photographic image stand out to the viewer.  In particular I have learned that whilst I may view a scene and understand the relationship between all the different elements, I cannot assume that my viewer will do so in the same way. It is therefore my responsibility as a photographer to use composition as a tool by which to inform the viewer, telling them exactly what I'm looking at and why.  Just as a group of singers tends to have one person singing the main part of the song whilst the others provide a backing harmony, a photograph needs to convey the importance of a singular subject matter that is supported by the rest of the image.  The application of such parameters have now become second nature whilst taking photographs and during the subsequent editing of the images.

As a direct consequence of undertaking work for the Collective I understand the photographic requirements for event photography much more clearly and exposure to a wider audience through this work has increased my professional profile and enabled me to begin the work of networking that will ultimately provide me with the means to earn a living in photography.  It has also been a great pleasure to work with an enthusiastic and hardworking team and this is something that I will miss when I leave Wrexham.

I am also pleased with the direction that my personal work has taken and look forward to exploring several of the themes begun this year in greater depth as my photographic storytelling develops.  Because of the necessity to meet the demands placed on me by this year's photographic projects - both personal and in the civic arena - I now feel in a far better position to pursue my vision as an artist using the camera as my medium than I did this time last year.  It was for this reason that I came to study at NWSAD three years ago and I am thrilled to have arrived at this point at last.

I would like to thank my all of my tutors for their help and support during this journey, in particular Senior Photography Lecturer Stewart Edwards whose patience has enabled me to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short space of time.

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