After the assessment from my Tutor and following re-work this is the final edit that was sent to the OCA for Assessment:

Based on the feedback and the tutor session with Russell, I have extended the assignment through experimentation. I took the idea of making Diptychs using 8 of the images and producing 4 sets. the first step was to sort and select the images to use, I printed all 12 of the images on 6×4 photo cards so that I could move them around on the desk and visualise the pairings.

I found three easy pairings and struggled a little with the fourth, I stuck with the pairing that Russell and I discussed as it was the most obvious of the set I changed the cropping and flipped and rotated each image so many times I am not sure how close the final cut came to the example, however, this was the final diptych for the BT exchange and the warehouse:

I was impressed with the level of study Russell had given to the original images, he had zoomed in to look in detail and worked out that I owned a black truck, which is often in the images, in homage to this I left it in my crop of the BT building and if you zoom in close you can even see me flying the drone next to it. In this image, I liked Russell’s idea of using the boundary lines at the top and having them intersect as diagonals in the middle at the top. I do think that if I wanted to move further in this project it would be good to use the drone to take images of a series of tall buildings looking straight down like the one of the BT exchange. The biggest issue for this is securing a TOLS (take off and landing site) and having the permission needed to fly these missions.

The next pairing that took me was to pair Farnham Castle with a water treatment silo:

I liked the similarity of the two images even though they are remarkably different structures they share similar compositional characteristics. I rotated and flipped them both until I found the composition to be most pleasing and this was where I ended up. It took some time and the judicious use of guidelines to match the two images and to crop and resize them so that the two circles were the same size and lined up with each other, I was taken by the fact that this apes the original water treatment picture which also featured two circles. I was quite attached to the original image and I am pleased how well the merged in the diptych to create the final image.

The next pair is a rather obvious pairing of two street scenes taken from above a housing estate. The two images both gave me some of the highest feelings of vertigo and I always felt worked well in the original series. They play to the idea I had that in order to make the viewer feel vertigo not only did the height and angle have to be right but there needed to be something going on in the image to draw the viewer in. This is where I think we manage to go from straight vertigo to the sublime as the sublime in Burkes definition is the boundary between pain and pleasure and in this case interesting or beautiful and off balancing enough to make you grab the armrests of your chair. the pairing turned out like this:

Where I think this works particularly well is in the rotation of the images to make the eye feel as unbalanced as possible, the image on the left was rotated by 90 degrees so that it fools the eye into thinking it is falling over, the image on the right is rotated so that the tilt is in a different plane making the discord between the two more highly amplified. Overall I am really pleased with this pairing as it certainly demonstrates my theory, especially when viewed at a large size.

The last one was something of a struggle to visualise how two of the remaining images could be paired to emphasise the feeling of vertigo but also to resonate with each other in a way that the other three did for me. This was my final selection and probably took as long as the other three put together, much of the time being spent on trying to identify similar characteristics and rotating and flipping and cropping the images to find a matched balance:

I don’t feel this is as strong as the others but was the best pairing I felt I could achieve without using extra images, If I wanted to make this set stronger and push the final project further I might go out with the drone to specifically hunt down vertigo images that work together compositionally. However, given the brief to experiment with the 12 images from the initial submission this was not a bad compromise. In some ways, I like these tow images better in their initial form.

<EDIT> Having discussed these new Diptychs with Russell, I have taken off the background which was only there because of a misunderstanding and re worked the Sewarage version, I was not happy with the above cut and it was the first thing Russell comented on too, since almnost good enough is not good enough I have done some rework based on a bit of sage advice given to me years agon on a course about creating a portfolio where no image should feel worse than the others. Russell comented that the Sewerage images reminded him of dominos, I liked this and went with that theme, I confess I swapped out the images for more suitable alternatives from the shoot and arrived at this:

This does leave the door open to create other images and take this much further, I think if this was my level 3 project I would do that and maybe have sets of four diptychs depicting different ideas, one I have already suggested was the idea of taking images looking down tall office buildings. This idea makes me think of the work of Mr Steel a youtube FPV drone pilot who makes quite controversial videos bombing all sorts of buildings and structures with an FPV drone (I must point out by bombing I mean flying up down and around the structure), his videos are hard to watch as they are really fast and disorientating but there are moments in those films that show a view exactly like the ones I am imagining. If you want to check out Mr Steel his Youtube channel is here https://www.youtube.com/user/MrSteeledavis

I am however pleased with the extended version of this project and feel I learned a lot by pushing my practice further than the original images as submitted. If this is a taste of how the rest of this module will go I think I am in for a treat.

Thank you, Russell, it has been very profitable to engage with you and develop my work and practice further.

As a general comment this was one of the most engaged and useful feedback sessions I have had, it was the first one using google hangout t discuss the feedback and this is a big part of why I rate it so high, that and the interaction with Russell was really useful and worked for me on a developmental layer.

My first comment is one of relief, as always you take your heart in hand when developing an assignment like this and you start having no idea if it will hit the mark or resonate with others, the fact that Russell was enthused by the idea was the first of the goals hit, he also comments that the response was very good, which is the cap on what was a very entertaining assignment. I am also glad that my premise of equating vertigo to the feeling of the sublime worked, and am especially happy that I have managed to demonstrate how much effort and supporting research I have done. In IAP I did masses of research which due to the way I presented it may well have washed over the assessors.

Just to shine a light on the Elephant in the room, I can confirm that I do intend to get assessed and am very much aiming for a degree.

Russell gave me two recommendations for rework, which seemed more like extending the work and developing it further, rather than reworking it because it was not good enough, I really appreciate the difference as the way this has been presented by Russell feels more like developing my practice. I will be developing the Diptychs as discussed and they should appear as the final cut above this post. I had a lot of fun doing the editing and was delighted by the results which made the work take on a totally different slant.

I also looked at the colour balance on the two rogue images, I have commented in the blog about the cause which was a software bug in the DJI software and reworked the two images here are the results:

As a last comment. I was also really pleased that the work I have put into the web site and blog have paid off, that firstly Russell felt it was easy to navigate and that he was able to tell from the work their how much effort had gone into my journey so far. I feel that Im lost a lot of marks in the IAP module because of the web layout and the fact that the assessors could not tell how much work I had done. Their comments on risk taking and reasearch were painful lessons, I did so much reading and research and carefull pasted it all onto the blog, unfortunatly it was in a way that made it really hard to navigate and determine what research prompted each decision. I can see how badly I got that wrong now. It is still a shame that it was the module where I started researching like a degree student and formulating ideas driven by that research. Sadly only I really know that, I learned anm awful lot in IAP but fell short of demonstrating it to the assessors, hopefully, I will address that as I progress through level 2.

Introduction

From the comments on my assessment for IAP: “In terms of creativity, it would be good to see you take more risks with your looking, reading, thinking, reflection as well as your visual outcomes.”  I decided that I would try to take more risks particularly visually and in my thinking, so rather than produce a series of “Standard” Beautiful Landscapes I wanted to do something more daring, to this end I decided to look more into the sublime and found several references in the Morley paper describing the sublime as something between pain and pleasure. Burke talked about a feeling of being out of control, Joseph Addison describes the sublime as “Something that fills the mind with an agreeable kind of horror” in an article on the Artiface I found the following quote “In regards to the Romantic view of the environment, the sublime can occur when natural grandeur overwhelms an individual to the point of causing fright or a feeling of helpless insignificance.” I, therefore, was looking for a way to demonstrate this fear, pain and pleasure referred to in a still image.

In responding to the brief I mostly ignored the beautiful as this seemed to be the standard response to the brief and to a landscape assignment, on evaluating the work of other students I felt that many of them had taken the more safe approach of the landscape photographer as can be seen in camera club competitions up and down the land, I wanted to show I could take risks and push the envelope.

In part, one much of the study focused on contemporary landscape and the way painters responded to the genre, later in part one we started to examine the meaning of the sublime, I was warned by Jane Kemp not to focus too much on the sublime, and I can see how that could be a rabbit hole as there are so many ways to read the meaning of the word, I decided to stick with Burke’s definition and try to make work that inspired the feelings he described.

In my mind, I wanted to make images that made the viewer gasp, I was thinking about that feeling you get from standing in an awe-inspiring location like the top of the Grand Canyon where the vista literally takes your breath away and makes you gasp in awe.

At first, I felt that an image taken from an elevated position such as the Grand Canyon example would be a sure way to make this happen, I considered lots of traditionally beautiful places to photograph and came up with the notion of taking them from the air with my Drone. My first experiments proved me wrong as can be seen on my blog, these images simply made the beautiful more beautiful, when they worked. Images of great distance were lovely but did not give me quite the reaction I was looking for.

I was reviewing a news article from the Daily Mail Online (not my preferred paper) reviewing what it called the best drone photos of 2015, on reflection I noticed that many of the images seemed beautiful and a few took my breath away, the ones that took my breath away were the ones that were shot straight down from above, and I found a few of my own images taken this way had a similar effect, I have previously discussed this on my blog. Drone photographers such as Januils Karolis and much of the work submitted under the Caters News Agency seemed to capture the effect I was looking for.

I set about taking images that fell into this category and quickly found that looking down from 400 feet was not enough, the images had to have more to them, a green sports field or a forest of trees did not give me the feeling of vertigo, I needed it to be busier, then I realised that the ones that really worked had elements in them that helped identify scale such as cars and buildings and these made me feel as though I was a long way up then the vertigo would kick in.

My final selection of images was driven by the ones that made me feel like I was falling into the scene, where the feeling of height was evident and where my centre of balance was over the centre of the image. I took many images and rejected all that did not fulfil my need to feel that disturbing and unnerving feeling you get from looking down from a great height.

My response to this assignment is far from the conventional and hopefully conveys my desire to take more risks with the assignments and challenge myself to make work that pushes the boundaries of the art.

Personally, I am happy that I made work that conveys that unnerving feeling I was searching for, and in tests has done so to the viewers it has been shared with, this feels like a topic that could taken much further given time, for now I am happy that I have achieved my goals for this assignment.

After the editing process the following images are the ones I submitted to my tutor for his assessment:

Having taken all the images with my Phantom the following images are the ones I selected to start the editing process:

The following are the learning log posts that specifically relate to the development of A1 Beauty and the Sublime, these are repeated here for clarity and are also posted on the main Learning log page in their proper sequence.