Stuart Hall – The Spectacle of the Other Reading

“Images do not carry meaning of ‘signify’ on their own. They accumulate meanings, or play off their meanings against one another, across a variety of texts and media.” (Hall, 1997 p232) Images do not have one set meaning Use our own contexts to determine meaning Meanings can be very personal to each person Relational to…

Photography Practice 22nd Feb – Long Exposure

During the week 3 photography practical, I took an interest in photography using a slow shutter speed to capture long exposures. I am intrigued with how photography can capture more than just a fraction of a second and the effect that this creates. This first image is of my friend stood alone on a beach…

Week 3 Photography Practical

During this week’s practical, I experimented with shutter speed, producing both long and short exposures. The following photos are my personal favourites from the practical. This photo was actually taken accidentally but I appreciate the effect it created. The shutter speed was incredibly slow, at about 30 seconds, causing this very bright white effect. I…

Week 2 Photography Attempts

During this week’s practical, I experimented with portraits, different angles and dynamic symmetry. The following three photos are my personal favourites from the practical. I like this portrait due to the natural pose the subject adopted. I did not ask the subject to sit still and I instead worked around his own natural movements and…

Week 2 – How Do We Read a Photograph? by Graham Clarke

  Although the act of looking is passive, the viewer enters into a more active dynamic when they begin examining the ‘codes, values and beliefs’ (Clarke, 1997, pg. 28) of a photograph. The viewer reads signals given by the photograph to determine meanings. Clarke acknowledges that a photograph is the ‘product of a photographer’ (Clarke,…

Week 1 First Attempts

The following photos are from the first photography practical of the semester. They demonstrate my first attempts at using the manual mode on the camera where I manually change the ISO, shutter speed and aperture values to achieve different affects. To experiment with the camera, I took the values to the extreme to notice their…

Reading: John Ingledew and the Power of Photography

For the first week of this photography module, I read the introduction to John Ingledew’s book Photography. Ingledew consistently ponders over the view that photography is a visual art form where “nothing is lost in translation” (Ingledew, 2005, pg. 15). I support this view that photography is as much an art form as painting or…