assignment 9. narrative project

reflection

This was a complicated assignment with many different aspects to pull together. Getting 8-10 well-composed, technically proficient images that each communicate a piece of the concept and on the whole have an effective narrative was difficult enough. To get images that met those requirements and are also visually cohesive was particularly challenging. I’m generally happy with the result, but I can see areas for improvement. 

concept

I think I was able to execute the concept of full cycle of consumerism fairly well.  Initially I planned to have the sequence be more linear, from shipping container to delivery truck to shopping to trash. I was concerned about that being a little boring as well as not allowing the first and last images to be the most impactful. Kody’s suggestion to a classmate that she could put her images together as diptychs or triptychs must have embedded itself in the back of my mind, because I woke up a few days before the assignment was due with the thought that pairing the images would be an effective way to organize them. In effect, the series is five diptychs with each having one image depicting the conspicuous face of consumerism and the other depicting a more hidden side. 

I chose to have all of the images of people be anonymous in some way, whether through blurring, by cutting the image off below people’s heads, having their backs to the camera, or having their faces covered with masks and hoodies. The anonymity is important because I wanted to show the problems with consumer culture, not call out or judge the people themselves. The anonymity of people in these images represents the fact that any of us can get caught up in America’s consumerist culture because it’s designed to be that way. It also echoes the fact that in a system of large retail chains we are basically  interchangeable. Our individuality doesn’t matter in this system. 

developing and visual cohesion

Being able to develop images in Lightroom was really important in completing this assignment. Every one of the images got at least some basic global tweaking to maximize overall shadows and highlights, contrast, etc. I used the detail panel on a couple of images to minimize the graininess that came along with a higher ISO. Alice’s suggestion of using lens correction and alignment made a big improvement on the Primark image, which I took fairly close to the entrance with a wide angle lens. (And after seeing the results I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed the distortion. Lesson learned.) I also used the brush tool to adjust the exposure of one part of the “$50 Under” image in order to make the upper right corner less distracting. 

Beyond corrections, one of the big things I used the developing tools for was to try to increase the overall visual cohesion of my images. Cohesion was a struggle when I first started to look at images from different shoots, because the light quality was very different from day to day, and from outdoors to inside a truck or a store. In a few rare cases I adjusted the exposure to try to get the overall sense of lightness or darkness in a pair of photos to be more aligned. But what worked even more was to make similar adjustments in all of the images to deepen the blacks and to bump up the saturation. I think the added saturation fits the theme of the set. Deepening the blacks helps balance the extra saturation and also helps emphasize one of the things that is consistent across almost all of the images — the presence of a little or a lot of black. 

In terms of cohesion, I think there are still one or two individual images that seem a bit like outliers. For example, the container ship photo is the only one that is taken at distance, while the others are shot from a much closer vantage point and fill the frame more. Although I shot some images of the container ship that do fill the frame, it seemed important to the concept to show the full ship and give a sense of the scale of products that we are moving across the world. I do think I was able to identify pairs of images that are cohesive with each other, so that is another reason the pairing of images works for this set.

technical execution 

Technically, I struggled in my first couple of shoots to capture shoppers on the move while also getting a good composition. Many aspects of those shoots were reminiscent of the shutter speed assignment. In my shoot from the first weekend, I didn’t use a fast enough shutter speed and didn’t end up selecting any of those images. I learned my lesson and leaned heavily on a fast shutter speed during my second shoot, which was on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Because it was a pretty overcast winter day, I had to rely on a fairly high ISO by mid-afternoon in order to freeze movement. I was able to address resulting graininess to some extent in Lightroom. All of this made me really appreciate good street photography. It’s a genre that I find very intriguing, but I would need a lot more practice in it to get really compelling images. 

My still subjects also created a few technical challenges. The container terminal in Boston is closed on the side where container ships are unloaded, so I had to take images of the ship from the opposite side of the channel. This meant I was fighting the light. The ship also comes in when the ship comes in, so I had to shoot some during the middle of the day at the worst time for harsh light because I wasn’t sure how long the ship would be there. Fortunately when I went back at dusk the ship was still unloading. (As an aside, you can’t really imagine the size of one of those ships until you see it in real life.) 

conclusion

Being able to complete this assignment required equal parts planning, flexibility, and luck. Planning was important for the container ship photo, as I was able to find a schedule for the for the port of Boston and regularly check GPS updates for the ship online to figure out exactly when it would be coming in. I needed to be flexible when I couldn’t find a dump or transfer station in the area that allowed non-residents on site, and had to use trash bins as a backup. I was lucky to find a trashed shopping bag to help communicate the waste that comes along with of all of our buying and in coming across someone who didn’t mind me taking pictures of the back of his truck while he was unloading it. Overall I guess it was about the persistence to go out time and again and make those opportunities happen. 

I plan to build on what I’ve learned in a few different ways. I do want to practice more street photography, and I’ve learned a few approaches that I will work to improve on. I’d also like to do more developing work in Lightroom to strengthen those skills. I will have an opportunity to do another long project in the spring, as I’m signed up for the advanced class and I believe that will involve a narrative project. At the beginning of this assignment three weeks sounded like a long time but it went by quickly. It will be a luxury to work on a project similar to this over the course of a semester.