This blog post is a mixture of items from artist research through publication planning through to misleading image editing.

Artist Research

Helen Chadwick

Tony Essler

Exhibition

In the next week, the venue and date will be confirmed with the venue owner. The last exhibition, during the summer, was presented to an audience as a learning exercise in preparation for this FMP module of the MA Photography course.

As a learning thing, it was invaluable on all fronts. It is proposed to repeat this form and improve upon areas identified from advanced ‘marketing’, through to the quality of the edit with improved visual language and narrative.

Rather than stand alone as an unmarked work – course delivery is digital, the exhibition will again avoid being a Vanity project and help build the final PDF edit.

Newspaper|Magazine| Book

Having learned to hand bind and having practised by making two books and an exhibition pamphlet, the principles of making have been acquired and will be used to guide the selection of paper medium rather than allocate time to the unmarked making which cannot be handed in.

So printed artefacts will be designed and made but will use a professional service. A candidate service is currently being looked into.

Exhibition printing and mounting can be kept ‘in-house’. A decision will be made on technique, whether or not to do as in the summer surface mount prints on 40 by 50 board. The quality of the craftsmanship can be elevated to archival print mounting using cutouts and non-destructive taping.

The idea is to act in advance and take advantage of the settled decision to use 4 by 5 print ratio at A4. This means the board can be cut-out in advance. The layout is proven to work with the exhibition physical space and a simplified display method and available studio-style lighting which has been further augmented.

The ‘deal-breaker’ is in the image edit. If necessary, any archive image used that has to be landscape 4 by 5 ratio, will break the exhibition layout not just in terms of conformity but spatially – the exhibition needs to sit well within the identified space.

The conformity can be enforced as long as it makes sense and any ‘vital” image may be re-introduced into the final PDF edit.

The main images were previously described as being in an abstract expressionist style, by creating an emotion or feeling. The project has moved ever closer to the abstract surreal.

The abstract surreal is intended to be themed with archive photographs: originals of the author, family archive or images processed from historical video footage.

Image Editing Update

Having fallen foul of an editing software fault during a previous module (Adobe Lightroom Community, 2018), during the break it became necessary to view edits at a Zoom level of 100%. Work saved radically differed from the same image displayed on-screen during the editing process. What you see is not what you get. Variation from intent does represent a problem.

Some research into the unintended change led to an answer online (Adobe Photoshop Community, 2018).

The explanation is that the processing software avoids computer processing load by interpolating any smaller representation. In the current project, this is typically when the evolving image is fitted to screen – do not rely on what you see on screen unless at 100%. This became apparent in making image comparisons of processing Method A versus Method B following last months (December) Symposium on Imaging Science.

Bibliography

Adobe Photoshop Community (2018) Merge Layers fault. Available at: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/merge-adjustment-layers/td-p/9842482.

Adobe Lightroom Community (2018) Random red blocks appear on images exported through Lightroom. Available at: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic/seemingly-random-red-blocks-appear-on-images-exported-through-lightroom/m-p/10134977.

Innocence (2020) innocence paris. Available at: https://www.innocence-paris.com/fr/.