Tutor feedback on
assignment one
It seems to me
that you are following a very reasonable workflow for the shooting part of the
work but that you might find better ways to organise your post-shoot workflow
as time goes on. The ideal is to settle
on one that works equally well for all the different work that you might do. So think about what are the common tasks;
importing from the camera, saving the digital files so they are easily
retrievable later, backing up, selection/editing (key words, metadata, tags
etc) image adjustment, printing/publishing etc. And what are the tasks only
applicable to the job in hand.
I have found
that using Adobe Lightroom has made my life very much easier in these respects
and in its latest incarnation it is capable of doing a lot of the things that I
would have done in Photoshop in the past but in a non destructive and rather
more controllable way, not to mention that corrections that need to be made to
a selection of images, a white balance adjustment, input sharpening, exposure
correction etc can easily be applied to multiple files and even saved as
presets. Additionally the ways that Lightroom
allows for adding keywords, metadata, tags etc and searching by these helps
enormously in organising my digital files.
I note that
you sent me jpegs. Are you shooting
jpegs or raw? The usual advice is that
raw is preferable as a shooting format and tiff for the format to which you
convert for editing, only using jpeg for final export when no further changes
are to be made. You may well be
following this procedure already but if not you should think about it.
If you haven’t
sorted out your problems with PS Elements and your hard drive, e-mail me about it,
I can’t promise to be of any help but I will try!
You say that
your prints weren’t as good a match to your screen image as you would have
liked...they seem a bit lighter and slightly more orange/red than my screen
displays them...and this is not unusual!.
Monitor calibration (what do you use?) is the first and essential stage
but printer calibration is the next step, at least you need to be using the
proper profile for your printer/paper/ink combination...and that is where the
trouble starts. You haven’t said what printer you are using but the print you
have sent suggest that it is a capable one so I will assume that it has at
least six colours (if not I am surprised at the quality) which is a good
start! Printers do not print as
accurately as might be expected at least in part because different papers will
react differently to the inks and so produce different results from the same
information. So one needs a small file
(ICC profile) to tell the printer driver
what corrections to make. For consumer printers
that are manufactured to no better than adequate tolerances the generic
profiles that some manufacturers supply are not entirely satisfactory, but
probably better than nothing and only available for a restricted paper/printer
combination. To achieve the best results
one needs a custom profile made with your
printer for a particular paper and with the inks you will use (particularly
necessary of using third party inks).
Some paper manufacturer/retailers offer this service free for their own
papers but otherwise they can be quite expensive. Do they work?
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper!
If you are using a paper from a manufacturer/retailer who offers a free
service you might as well go for it, if not I doubt it unless you are using a
high end printer and selling work. If
you are using a profile then the colour management on the printer should be
turned off and the option to ‘Let Photoshop manage colour’ selected in the
printing dialogue. To fine tune the
prints, or instead of a profile (but more of that in a moment) there are a
number of possibilities; one is to adjust the monitor settings so that the
image on screen (a test card type image is much the best for this) matches a
print made using the profile as closely as possible, another is to adjust the
colour in Elements to get a test print as close to the screen image as
possible, note the adjustments and then apply these to all images just before
printing. The alternative is to get
closer to the film/wet printing paradigm and make test prints, these need to be
the same dimensions as the final print but don’t need to be of the whole image
(a test strip in the old way) or to make a print and adjust the monitor as
close as possible to the print then you when you adjust the digital file to
look righ on the monitor it should print correctly...this does away with
monitor calibration of course but as the point of calibration is to get good
prints, you are in effect calibrating your monitor just to the printer not to
some other standard. Your prints are
pretty close and as it is almost impossible, even on professional printers, to
get an exact match I would do some playing around with the colour settings in
Elements to get the print the way you want (test prints/strips) and not the
difference from the setting when it looks right on the monitor and add/subtract
this just before printing all images.
Choice of
paper is an important issue and a matter of personal taste. However, cheap papers are a snare and
delusion. They are not usually
consistent and can be almost impossible to colour match. High gloss papers don’t work terribly well
with pigment inks (problems with the blacks in particular) and if using pigment
inks you really need a different one for gloss (this includes semi-gloss and
lustre) as opposed to matt (including semi matt) papers, often referred to as
photo black and matt black. Dye inks
don’t have these problems but their prints are not guaranteed to last as long
as pigment ones.
I have given
up using high gloss papers as the inks seem to change the glossiness of the
paper depending on the colour. On the
other hand some papers show a difference in sheen where there is no ink on the
paper (extreme highlights) and some people make sure that there is some density
even in the highest of highlights.
Ok, enough
about the technicalities.
There are so
many ways that you could organise the order that this set is looked at. What you decide on will depend on what you
are trying to say with the images as a whole and you should think about the
images submitted for each assignment as a coherent set.
If we take the
order that they appear in the document there are a number of issues
raised.
 |
| P488 :f3.5 @ 1/400 ISO 200 +0.3exp. 18mm Cloudy WB |
 |
| P489: f5.6 @ 1/50 ISO 100 55mm Cloudy WB cropped |
It is possible to see the first two (P488, 489) as being odd ones out in that they have little relationship to the idea of fishing that is apparent in all the rest, if you are trying to show a variety of uses perhaps you need more such images. However, there is a strong, changing, colour link running through the set and this first image sets blue as the initial colour, picked up in the cable and the red/orange as the second colour is established
 |
| P490: f4.5 @ 1/320 ISO 100 148mm cropped Cloudy WB |
 |
| P491: f4.5 @ 1/80 ISO 100 18mm Cloudy WB |
This continues to P490 with the red/orange giving way to yellow and
the swan tying the second and third image together. Yellow becomes the dominant colour in P491and
P492 then red with increasing amounts of blue in the next three.
 |
| P492: f4 @ 1/125 @ 1/125 ISO 100 28mm Cloudy WB cropped |
 |
| P495: f5.6 @ 1/50 ISO 800 27mm Cloudy WB cropped |
 |
| P494: f13 @ 1/25 ISO 400 -0.7exp. 24mm AWB cropped |
P495,6 and 7 establish fish as the dominating image and ‘fishy’ colours in P496 and 7. Circles dominate the last two P498 and 9 and bring us back to blue. Alternatively you can think of a narrative starting with P490 through to P497, the boat coming in to the fish on the slab.
 |
| P499: F4 @ 1/160 ISO 100 114mm Cloudy WB |
 |
| P497: f8 @ 1/30 ISO 100 37mm AWB |
The visual quality of the images is good, you have a compositional sense, the low viewpoint and diagonal composition of the pleasure boats conveys the potential for speed or at least movement and excitement; the judicial use of close up on the fish works well and in general I agree with your conclusions about the virtues of your compositional decisions etc in your notes.
All in all I
think that you have learned a lot from this section even when it is things that
need addressing in your workflow. The
images show promise as a set and are all good images in their own right. A good start.
As you are
aware, this assignment does not count in the assessment but you should send it
along with the rest to help the assessors see where you start from and give
them the whole, err, picture. I know
that they like to see all the work.
Learning Logs/Critical essays
Your log is
doing the job(s) that it should and I think that your self assessment is very
honest. Make sure that you include
comments on all the books exhibitions etc that you explore and try to talk
about how and if they affect your own work and/or attitudes to images. Try to get to shows of all sorts not just
photography and don’t miss out on the shows at colleges in your area
(Bournemouth has a high reputation and shouldn’t be missed)
If you haven’t already got them
the two Liz Wells books are worth having and dipping into:
Wells, L., ed., 2004. Photography:
a Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Pointers for
the next assignment
This assignment brief is quite
detailed and complex. Make sure you read
it through carefully and plan out what you are going to do and how. Make sure that you keep notes on all your thoughts
and changes of mind, changes to planning and any problems that arise and how
you solved them.
Re Raw ,I haven't used raw as yet but know that I need to move to this approach ..friends keep telling me too so again will take that on board. As far as calibration of monitor and printer go I've been using Colormunki ...is there anything out there that is better and not too expensive? Interestingly, my printer is a very cheap HP Deskjet bought in Tesco so maybe I got lucky there ! '
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