Final Blog of year 2

At the end of this project I’ve got to say that I’m happy. I like the look of each of the circular bridges, I achieved what I set out to do being taking a bridge out of it’s normal look and am just generally pleased with how they look. I would certainly like to push this forward, even if its just more bridges, ways of transport or different structures, I think it could be a very good project to push forward. Over the past two terms I've only gone to three locations for bridges, being Hertfordshire, Leicester and London and I've only really looked at bridges going over rivers however this is kind of a narrow selection of bridges, if I go to villages then they would have a different, much smaller look and then driving on the motor way I would get a completely different look. Spaghetti Junction for an instance could look awesome, also if I could find a suspension bridge could be brilliant.

One thing I do need to make a comment about is that this was the first time I got anything printed bigger then A4. I went to a printing shop that I went to in my first year that gave me some brilliant A4 prints however the prints this time around on A3 just didn’t look anything specials which is extremely annoying. I would have tried to find somewhere else however it cost me over £20 and I couldn’t afford to go somewhere more expensive.

Presentation of work

Coming to an end of this part of the project, one thing that I am still contemplating is how I would want to present my work in a gallery environment. After thinking about it over the last week or two I've come up with three ways that I feel would suit the work the most. Two ways would be very basic prints, the only difference is the size and wall layout. First one would be the size I have printed at now (A3) and just have in one long line. The problem with the technique I use is that it stretches everything so even if the files are good (shot in RAW) it will still look like it's ever so slightly pixelated which is really annoying so I think anything printed over A3 wouldn't look very good even if the files are good.

The second way I would like to do it is square light boxes of about an 20x20 size. This is just a 'nice idea' as it would cost a fortune to actually achieve this but with the light I think it would be the best way to get rid of the low quality look.

Thirdly is one that my lecturer was saying could look good. This would be a video display, two projectors next to each other, both aimed the same way so both displays are next to each other (maybe even a bit of overlap) however both showing something different. The first would be an extremely quick slide show of the bridge worlds, say less then a frame a second so it would hard-ish to see exactly what each bridge looks like but would have a really interesting look. The second projector would be a lot slower, around a frame every 3 seconds and this would show a very classic look of a bridge, all from the same kind of angle and maybe all in back and white (35mm scans). Also what could be a interesting idea would be to add with sounds to help the atmosphere. For the slower projector just have a simple sound of a slide projector however for the faster display have some kind of beat or just a single random noise ever frame.

Something to contemplate for the future however at this moment in time I would think that the first way would be better as the other two are a bit to over the top.

Also just a side note, the order is not at all important and if I did do a video it would allow me to do a lot more pictures, standard A3 print would be around 10 and the light box would be around 5-6.

Final Image 7&8

So here are Images 7 and 8 both of which are from my trip the of the largest viaducts in the UK. I decided to use two of the pictures from this shoot as I found them so intriguing and both of these Images have a good look. The reason why I like them so much is that I was able to get them almost perfect, the sides are connected perfectly and with the white background they stand out brilliantly. This is I suppose every image should look like with the bridge perfectly connected and there being a white background but then I don't mind it with the busier background.

Final Image 6

This is the first bridge from back in Hertfordshire. What's different then all the others in that i actually underside one of the larger bridges in my area. It gives a really interesting look, the colours are all nice and bright and due to there being so many support pillars I'm very happy with the patterns.

Final Image 5

This is the biggest and possibly the best bridge I got from my trip to London. If you couldn't tell this is Tower Bridge with the HMS Victory in the foreground. How it's one sided heaving gives a good look, the two main towers works brilliantly. I'm pretty happy with this, I would of much preferred a nicer blue background but I think the grey helps to make the bridge world stick out.

Final Image 4

This image is one of my most preferred out of the 10. The reason being is that everything fits almost perfectly. The bridge connects perfectly at both ends, the actual look of the bridge is a good pattern and the train also works well. Also the main suspension supports give of a good look with the lines.

Final Image 3

This image I really didn't think much of first however when I was just looking about the look of different but then I realised that the two cranes where almost perfectly opposite. I thought that the look was really interesting, also the blue netting that was on the bridge was also giving a really interesting look. Unlike the other two I didn't capture anything going over the bridge ore any kind of boat going under the bridge which I was happy about as I didn't want everything image to look too much the same. What I do like though is double arch in the centre which again is look I'm happy about. Also unlike the other two images the background is a lot more basic, I took the picture from a lot further out and didn't zoom in much to capture the top of the cranes the building are pretty small and the sky was just grey so is a lot more basic. I suppose I do kind of prefer this look as the bridge would is a lot more stand alone but I'm still happy with the outcome of both.

Final Image 2

So this picture is another of the London bridges that I thought had a very different look about any of my 'just a bridge'. Again on the outer side I was able to capture a London red double decker and on the inner side I there is the second biggest ship on themes. Also what I like about this bridge is the one sided look about it with it getting thicker on the left hand side and the main support pillar there as well. Also something to point out about the London pictures is that because of the background is so much busier then some of the ones in Hertfordshire you have the stretched lines which don't really mean anything to me but they do look different then some of the latter images.

Final Image 1

Ok so this is the first of the final images that I'll produce for this project. First of, this is one of the London bridges. The reason why I decided to choose this image is because of the double arch in the middle which almost looks like a figure of eight which has a really good look. Also what else I like about it is the bus and the boat in the middle and on the outer side of the bridge so it almost looks like it's trapping the boat which is something that I've often been looking for as well as something moving on the outer side which is something else that I've been aiming to get when possible.

The final selection

Just a a quick update. Here is the final rough selection of images that I'm going to use. At the moment I've got 15 images that I'll create into a bridge world however I would want to cut that down to 10. I've gone quite a lot by the bridges that I've already done as a lot of them are really strong and it would be pointless for me to try and collect any more bridges this late on into the project.

As you can see I've already made them into the style that I need to create the world as I need to look at the shape of the bridge. What's needed to make of these pictures interesting is some large part of the bridge like the viaducts arches or pillars.

The final countdown

So, I just had my final tutorial with Greg. It went pleasantly well, he likes my project, happy with the pictures so far and it's now just to select the final images and to get them printed. What I think I will do it have 10 pictures, 5 from London/Leicester and 5 from Ware/Hertfordshire to as there is some difference between the two looks. Depending on my Money situation I would like to get them printed on A3, having the actual picture square and then just white sides. However I'm not sure how much I will be able to afford that so it may go down to 10x8 which wouldn't be the end of the world. But for now, I'll have to actually decide which of my pictures I want to have.

One bridge that I missed out from London in the Tower Bridge just because I think it deserves it's own entry. For me it's brilliant, the two towers work perfectly and with the HMS victory in the middle of the bridge I find it fantastic. This is certainly a picture that will be in my final selection. What I have done to this picture in post editing is to whiten the sky. In the original the sky was a really dull grey tone and I really disliked it so I just made it white and it brings out the bridge a lot more.

The London Final

Ok, so, good, I'm happy with what the outcome of my trip too London town looks like. What really pissed me of is that when I left Ware the sun was shinning and fantastic blue sky but by the time if got into London the sun wasn't as strong and the blue sky was now white.

This picture is 3 bridges in 1. Looking back down the river from Tower of London you can see London Bridge and two more in the background, well you can see the supports but I really like the look. One to look in the final selection.
Big Ben bridge, for whatever reason the bridge seems much stronger then the background, it almost seems pale to the rest of the picture but that's something I should hopefully be able to crack in Photoshop.


Overall I think that the day went well. Really annoyed about the washed out sky but then at least it wasn't rain, could have been a lot worse. The lines a shaped are really interesting due to the look of the bridges in London and I'm now going to have to think about what I wont to actually show in the final selection of pictures.

Selected Images

So, looking at the London selection I've got to say that I'm happy. The pictures look like they will work well for becoming bridge worlds. The big problem I had though was that because there are just so many bridges are certain points of the river that I is ever so slightly hard to tell one bridge from the next. This may possibly work to my advantage and give a new look or it may be too much of a cluster f*ck and look just to messy and not be able to tell one thing from the next.

The cliché red bus of London. I know it's typical however how I've had this project so far it does follow my theme and should look pretty good when I edit it!
Having Big Ben in the background I'm hopping should add a twist to the picture and give a interesting look.


I didn't notice when I took this picture however the two cranes in the above picture are almost perfectly opposite, should look great when made into a bridge world.

London

So over my Easter break and the first opportunity of a sunny day I took a trip into London to walk down the river and go to all the main bridges that I could find. I started out at Westminster bridge and then walked down to the tower of London. I think on the way I got around 11 bridges in total. Here below is the unedited load that I took over the 5 hours I was wondering. I'm happy, I'll go through and select some of the better images and post in a couple of days.

March

I can't lie but lately this project hasn't been my top priority as I've had to do an essay and do work for my live brief (working as a professional). This doesn't mean that I haven't been doing work at all however I haven't been out to take any more bridges as I would be wiser for me to head to London when I'm back home for Easter.

The work that I have done over the last few week has manly been converting the pictures I've been taking into a bridge world, these being all the ones from Ware and the others I got when I was home last including the viaduct. Just looking at the outcome I am generally happy with the way this project is going. There are a selection of the images below as I'm just happy with the outcome. I personally find them exciting and thankfully when I had a assessment a couple of weeks ago my lecture and some peers complimented my work and I really can't see any reason do do any thing different from what I'm doing at the moment apart from take a lot more photos and find some new location with interesting looking bridges. One thing that my lecture was recommending was that I could possibly make the final work into a video installation. This being having two screens side by side with one showing the bridge worlds but showing them really quickly to the point where it could become a bit of a find fuck but then one the second screen have them with a very classic look of each bridge and going pretty slowly and just showing the bridge in all it glory. I honestly think this could work. I always had the intention of having both the bridge world and the original look however this way seems really appealing and is something that I will truly contemplate when the time comes round to it.

Over the weekend

Lots of bridges, walked from the town next to my own and was able to get a good amount of photos. Also, which I was home I was able to go to one of the largest Viaducts within the UK which was good so took another good step on this project and I know that there are more within Ware which I can do when I come home over Easter.

Now, just got to edit them and see what they look like, hopefully the viaduct should look really interesting with all it's arches.

Prentation

So today I presented my work in progress to my lectures and piers. It did go pretty well, unfortunately I didn't get any pier feedback but I did get some good points from the lectures. First of, they both liked the bridges made into a circle, that idea is now %100 and now pushing on with it strongly. However, and this isn't a big but, they did say that it should show each bridge on it's own not placed with the original picture of the bridge so that it leaves more to the viewers imagination which makes a lot of sense and will cut down my work load a huge amount and will mean that I don't have to drag around my F5 with me to all the places. And again, now what I need to do is just go and get more bridges, I'm going home to Ware over the weekend which I should be able to get easily over ten hopefully more which is all good. I'm actually pretty happy with this project now and just got to get on with it.

Just more work

Now I know what I want to do with this project it's now time for me to just get on with finding new bridges as the top priority. So as I've been mainly doing this project in Leicester I went out to just to get some bridges that I've haven't used yet and I am happy to say that I did find several new ones and a couple that once man into a circle gave a good look. These two bridges are probably the two more exciting bridges that I found within Leicester. What it does mean that I'm going to have to start travelling now to get newer and more different styles.

So the two above are the two original images and the two below are the two altered images and I think it works well. Just got to now get more images together so a trip to London, Ware and possibly Birmingham is now in order.

After Viva

So today I had my Viva for this project so far. I'm happy as are my lectures. So far within this project I've been able to tell what has and what hasn't worked which is always a good thing and I'm in that place where I now know what I want to do now and have to just get on with it which I don't think will be to hard.
What I'm going to do is pretty much carry on where I left off before Christmas. My bridge world is something that I feel very confidant with but just need to play around with several more ideas and just refine my technique when doing it. What I'm also going to do is scrap the Polaroid idea as I don't really see it being worth it and what I'm now going to do is just have the bridge, very dead pan and kept as basic as possible. I'll still aim to shoot on 35mm as I feel that would work best and what I'll do is present two photos together, one of bridge would and one of basic bridge and both of the same bridge.
On another note I'm sure how much I want to carry on video, it doesn't seem to really be working and I wouldn't be sad to see the end of it. If I find or think of anything that really looks interesting then I may change my mind but for the mean time this project is now photo based.

Video 3

My third video out of the three I made over Christmas was using the footage that I took where I just used the zoom feature of the camera. It's not bad, it's not great. Again I wanted the sound to throw the viewer of what was going on in the video which I feel that I achieved that. After some thought and re-watching it a couple of times over I do see areas for improvement. One of the thing that would just make it a bit more watchable is to shorting the time between each clip as at the moment it is from one side of the bridge to the other or until the camera can't focus but I looks like it could work better if had each edit a lot shorter, like less then a second which I think would make the whole video a lot less repetitive and ever so slightly boring.

http://www.youtube.com/user/hursty1989#p/a/u/0/9iRrG6_Hf9U

Video 2

After I finished editing my first video I was just mucking around looking at stuff Final cut when I came across a filter called Mirror which basically mirrors half the video and it gave a pretty cool effect so I decided to create a whole video out of it. It's nothing special but at least it's a bit more exciting then the first video. The thing that I liked about it is that it does kind of create a never ending bridge which is what I want to achieve. It does work, and the camera shack does prove to have a different look. What could be a good thing to do it get a rail and make it a smooth movement but I think it would be to hard to get the equipment to do that.
The sound was also something that I wanted to play with on my second video attempt. I've had garage band on my laptop for a while but never really used it so I decided to have a go. It would be beyond me to do anything that interesting but I just tried some stuff out and I'm kind of happy. It does sound awful however I wanted it to be a cluster fuck of sound to distract the viewer of the visual and it does do that well.
When it comes to sound I normally prefer the more basic approch. I went to a gallery in Portugal last year and saw a bit short film the visual was really calm and the soundtrack was just a really basic single note for the whole duration but very loud and it worked extremly well so I wanted to kind of copy it.

http://www.youtube.com/user/hursty1989#p/a/u/1/6kxc4BOH3EQ

Video 1

So below is my first attempt of bridge related video. It's not great, pretty boring and even 30 seconds seemed a little bit to much. To try and make it a little bit interesting I decided to play about with the speed of each clip to to just see if there I could make it a tad more exciting however I didn't really do much. The main outcome from this video is that I now know that I'm going to have to experiment more but unfortunately the only footage that I have is just of me walking over the bridges. Also, sound is something that I'm going to try and play with, possibly try some really repetitive stuff which could be interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/user/hursty1989#p/a/u/2/ip1pAJBR6mA

Over Christmas

Over the past two weeks I have created three video pieces for this project. The first of the three, very basically is just of the footage of me walking over the bridges but, sped up, the problem is that bridges are pretty boring, well video of bridges sure is, so I had to experiment with trying to 'spice' it up a bit and to do that I tried changing the speed of the footage, never slower, just different paces, I think at some point it's five times the original speed. So far it isn't a hundred percent complete so I have yet to upload it however I from what I've seen it's not too bad, the only slight problem there is with is that each edit goes to a different speed making it very random but I think that was the best idea. What I did have in mind was that it would go from slow to fast and then back to slow however there was something about it that didn't quite work out so I went for the random approach instead.

The second video that I created started from me being bored and just playing around with some of the filters within finalcut until all of a sudden I discovered a filter called 'Mirror' which is simple just mirroring half of the footage. The reason why I like it was just because it worked well when I had it all linked together as the railings of the bridge connected and it changed how each bridge looked which I liked the look off. Again I still need to complete the last part but it seems Ok.