London Trip

We went to London on a school trip for a day. We visited the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern. We started by visiting the Saatchi Gallery. I enjoyed going there and whilst I was there I tried a mini experiment of trying to keep the camera in the same place and taking a photograph of the room every 10 to 20 seconds.
I thought that this worked well, however, if I tried this again, I would try to use a tripod and keep the same time difference between each shot.

I did take more photos however I selected these because they showed the change over time and I liked how  the series of images finishes with only one person in the photograph creating a feeling of isolation which goes with the plain black clothes in the white room.

When I walked around the gallery I spotted some cardboard cut-out artwork of people. I thought of the work we did about Stephen Gill and his project of taking photos of the back of billboards so I tried this by walking around the back of the cardboard and taking photos.

Next time I would make sure there were no distractions from the subject in the back ground, I would have done this however I could not see this until after I left and was looking back through the photos. 

I took some photos of peoples reactions to photographs or what they are doing when looking at the artwork.

When taking the next photograph I had the intention of taking a photo of somebody taking a photograph of somebody else capturing the image on the wall. However, when I looked back at this I noticed that the positioning of the people changed the way they look so it is as if the first person in not photographing the second person.

Towards the end I walked in to one of the rooms that was very loud and noisy so to show this in my picture I used a slow shutter speed to represent chaos.

The Tate Modern

          The Tate Modern had a different type of artwork in their Turbine Room this year. It was performance art with paid performers to interact with visitors and move around and sing in obscure ways. Tino Sehgal Created this exhibition and choreographed it using movement sound and conversation.
          Around the Turbine Room some of the actors would come and talk to visitors and tell them a story. I thought that I could use these stories and try to create a photography project from the topic of the story for example, the first story I was told was about the man when he was in boarding school and throughout the story he kept repeating 'split-second decisions'. I thought about this theme of decisions and thought of how people make decisions by flicking a coin. I used a 10p coin because of the smooth shape and it is shiny. I used a black background with light shining from the left hand side because the shutter speed was so high. I used manual focus and flicked the coin in front of the camera whilst attempting to photograph the coin sharply in mid-air.

However when I was flicking the coin, in many of the photos my hand was in the image and it was difficult to judge if my hand was in the image when flicking the coin.

It was also difficult to get the right shutter speed to stop the coin being blurred and to flick the coin the right distance away from the camera to keep the focus. To try to solve this I made the shutter speed higher and the light closer to try to keep the same lighting.

This helped with the sharpness of the coin but there was not enough light. I decided to make my shutter speed a bit slower again and used two coins to see if I could capture both coins in the air.

Because I was having to try to get both coins in the picture I could not get many good, clear photos and I was running out of time because the lesson was about to end.
     I also tried flicking the coin in front of the light. This created a silhouette of the coin and was different from the other photographs because it changed from a bright coin with the dark background to a dark coin with a bright background.

I prefer the first images because they gave detail of the coin where as the silhouette just looks like there is a hole in a piece of paper.
    After going to the Saatchi Gallery, I still had the idea of long shutter speed in my head and thought that I could try this to capture the movement of the performers.

To keep the camera still I had to rest it on the floor because I did not have a tripod with me. Because I was on the floor, I thought of capturing the movement of feet as the performers walked around me.

    When the performers were running around, I noticed that they would go in groups and chase one of the people in that group. I tried to show this with a fast shutter speed instead of the slow shutter speed that I was using earlier.
As I looked around the museum I  found a small room where two projectors where facing each other to create different shadows on the opposite walls when people walk in to the lights. This was challenging to take photos in because of the dark lighting with the bright projections so I placed the camera on the floor and rest the lens on my phone so that I could see the lights rather than all of the floor.