After my last shoot went really well I decided to get a tripod so that my camera could be in a fixed position and use a slow shutter speed which allows be to set my f stop at f/22, thus hopefully giving me really detailed images. The reason that I have decided to do this is most of the photographers I have researched so far and taken inspiration from their work have been using either medium or large format cameras that have been sitting on tripods. The reason they do this is because using this techniques means the detail they get from their images is second to none, and also their depth of field is very large which results in everything in the image being in focus. Another benefit for using a tripod is that it slows your practise down, meaning that each of your images takes longer to compose and shoot, thus meaning that they should be better composed and have an increased level of attention to detail in each one.
For this shoot I am still using the work of Chris Jordan as inspiration, but re-shooting the same kind of images I produced last shoot but hopefully with a higher attention to detail, which should make this shoot a much more professional standard and more like exhibition quality.
When I went back for this shoot the first place I went to was this shard pile which had changed quite dramatically since the first time I photographed it. It's quite interesting that even though this place seems quite dead due to all the waste being at the end of its lifespan everything is actually alive and always moving and changing.
I really like this image and I think that using the tripod has helped my images loads because it just adds a level of detail that you don't get with hand held images at only f/16, using this f/22 aperture has allowed me to get everything in crisp detail. I think the tonal affect and tactility of these images of the shard pile are really impressive and make for fantastic images. But I don't like the reflection in the water, which is the only downside to the image.
This image is good because it captures basically the whole size of the pile, and the colours and tones that are visible make me think that it looks like a mountain range out in the wilderness somewhere, but with a man made twist. I think for a viewer these images are really interestingly detailed to study.
Like before I went back to the plastic household waste pile, but after re-shooting it, it doesn't really look any different compared to the first time I captured it. It does still look interesting at how big the pile is which makes the viewer feel like they have no part in it until they start studying it to realise its made up of objects they throw away all the time.
I also re-photographed the metal piles which had also changed a lot since the first time photographing them, they were now made up of a lot more brown pieces of metal which does reduce some of the impact that the first set of images produced. But I think thats just part and parcel of my project because I could re-visit this site hundreds of times and each time be completely different to the first.
As final pieces I think these images would look really good enlarged so a viewer could study them in high detail, The different shapes, patterns and colours these high detailed photographs create are really interesting to view, and don't look anything like I have seen before.
I kind of prefer this image to some of the other I have done of the close up photos of the metal waste piles, because of the ground at the foreground of the image. I feel this brown makes the image look more like a landscape than the still life affect the other photographs create. Also in this image I love the different tones that are given off from the different materials and colours that are found within it.
These two images work well at showing more of the scale of the mountains of waste, which is probably more impacting to a viewer than the close ups. Because if they can see the large scale of the waste it will make them feel that it is more of a bigger problem than they first thought.
Overall this shoot and development of Chris Jordan's work has been very successful, but the last few three images that I took which can be seen above have started making me think about the landscape photographs of Burtynsky and Juiliang that I previously discussed. I think what made them so impacting was the scale of the photographs. Even though these images above work really well and look very proffesional and have a great tonal quality to them I feel that these don't portray the message I want to get out of this project, which is how big a problem our consumption and thus wastage is. These images will be perfect for my exhibition book, but I think for my final piece I need something more large scale and impacting to make the viewer realise the scale of the problem, this can only be done by landscape images.