Image 9

Image 8

Image 7

Thursday 10 March 2011

No camera today, thought I'd make notes anyway. Waiting for film to be developed, 1 hour processing.

'Once upon a time in a magical land of beautiful shoes' ... a girl stands waiting, hair troubled by the blustery wind, short, choppy, styled. She's petite, possibly oriental. Small bright red cardigan, clasping a patent bag, also bright and twice the size or more of her petite frame. She smiles stepping into the main area of the high street and greets a friend. Wind. Balloons. Red and bright green. It's lunch hour 1.03pm. Blue sky and sunshine fades in and out of fast moving thin clouds. The pace of the people is fast, purposeful, in all directions crossing each other. I'm looking into an arcade from a coffee shop. A man walks by holding a basket ball, he begins to bounce it, somehow out of place. The weather has been erratic all day. A fine rain now decends, blue sky remains. Behind me I hear excited chatter from two women in a language Im not sure of. Possibly Eastern European. I hear intonation I vaguely recognise from my trips there. A girl and a boy walk past, hand in hand at a slower pace. She points in the shoe shop.

Image 6

Images 4, 5 and 6 were taken on colour film and cross processed. They form part of a book I created of a road trip to Yosemite national park, California. I chose to cross-process my images for my own experimentation and to present a more unusual view of this area. My images varied considerably from preserving a certain beauty to conveying a sense of the journey. I experimented with slow shutter speeds and the results helped me decide to use this approach for my current psychogeography-related project.

Image 5

Image 4

Image 3

IMAGES 1, 2 and 3 are all part of the set 'Portrait of a Ballet Dancer'. For these I created abstract portraits which focus less on ballet and more on the time in-between dancing and aim show something of the dancer's character. Image 1 (above) is a cyanotype (scanned) which I produced last year using digital and traditional methods. I have included Images 2 and 3 to show the differences which can be achieved in post-processing from one shoot. I chose to convert Image 2 into black & white and for the whole shoot I used 'red head' lamp with coloured gels (seen in Image 3). Since originally, cyanotypes were used to make blue prints for buildings this may be an apt approach (for the architecture of a city) to explore further.

Image 2

Digital work in the studio. A portrait of a ballet dancer.

Image 1