Printing for Portfolio

Due to my working methods throughout the brief being fully experimental I decided to continue this style of practice when deciding on ways to print my final imagery.

I thought that it would be more interesting to print on different textured papers keeping in theme with the fact that I have already been creative and experimental with textures within my editing workflow.

I therefore purchased 5 different types of artistic paper to test printing my final images on however on the majority they saturated too much of the ink, lost detail within the print and also the contrast of the image seemed ever so much different from my computer screen image.

After further researching I have come to realise that the images may have been printed much better if I had of used Ink Aid to treat my non-photographic paper beforehand.

Ink Aid is a product that allows you to coat the surface of a high majority of alternative surfaces for which you are able to print upon and still achieve an excellent quality print.

inkAID™ coatings provide the ability to ink jet print on virtually any type of substrate with clean, clear, crisp imaging with brilliant colors and high definition.

There was 1 type of textured paper which added to the overall effect on a few of the final images, displaying a sense that the saturated colour in fact added to an old-style quality usually obtainable from film darkroom printing.

But with any type of finished print and any type of photograph they are all open to subjectivity therefore I decided to print all of my final images on two types of paper, 1 non-photographic textured paper & 1 glossy photographic paper, giving the viewer a choice on preferred output.

Contrast of Culture - Landscape & Portraits

Throughout the Professional Practice brief I set out to achieve imagery to which would attribute the up most of originality. By exploring using different tools within Photoshop, with the aid of Online tutorials via You-Tube, I came to learn how to use layers and be able to combine two of my original photographs and apply them together to employ a totally different representation of the real.

I have produced contrasting images from different parts of the world (Liverpool, England and Cape Town, South Africa) to allow the viewer to make their own conclusions by revamping straight documentation of a person or even a landscape.

My concept came to be 'to be able to show differences between culture, places and climate within 1 finalized image.

Competitions

At the beginning of the brief we were asked to look into competitions which would be relevant to participate in relating to our own personal area of photographic practice. We would then work towards the set competition requirements as well as to continue to develop our own technical proficiency within our chosen workflow, guided by influence from the already professional photographers, and show evidence of our trials and errors.

The idea of us as Photography Students competing within photography contests is to allow our work to become more widely known and in the event of either winning or possibly being awarded as the runner up in any National or International Photography Competition, that this would certainly be an achievement to possibly securing more potential future clients within the fierce Photographic Employment Industry.

As I am a subscriber to a number of online photographic newsletter journals and have signed up to receive the magazine for

both sources have become great tools for informing you in regards to a high majority of national and international competitions which are held throughout the current and future years.

Below are some of the competitions I believe that are suitable to enter in regards to the style of photography I have undertaken on this brief. The majority of the competitions sourced are taken from both the Professional Photographer Website and the Photography Competitions Website

http://www.professionalphotographer.co.uk/Competitions

and

http://www.photographycompetitions.net/

The Professional Photographer of the Year Awards 2011

The Categories

We have 13 categories for photographers to enter and the titles are generic to encourage as many as possible to take part. There will be a winner and runner-up in each category, plus Best Portfolio winner and the Professional Photographer of the Year title. You may enter as many categories as you like but are limited to one image in each, with the exception of the Portfolio Award.

Category 10: Student of the year

An open category for anyone in full-time education studying a photographic discipline

Sponsored by Light Blue Software

Category 12: Breaking the mould

Another open category for everything weird, wacky and avant-garde – have some fun!

Sponsored by Hahnemuehle

http://london-photographic-association.com

Runs from 2011-09-12 to 2012-01-31 00:00:00

The Brief

The Portrait Award

As always we encourage entrants to interpret the brief in the widest sense, portraying your subjects with emphasis on their identity as individuals.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/travel/article848624.ece

The Sunday Times travel photography competition 2012

The Sunday Times Competition is one that I am interested in entering too in the near future, especially after recent talks with a work colleague in the hope of a visit to Pakistan!

Due to this competition also running every month I have also decided to enter a photograph from my collection taken from Cape Town, South Africa

Portraits from South Africa

Whilst in Cape Town I wanted to capture striking portraits of the locals with the use of my 35mm film SLR camera, therefore I dedicated this camera to capturing only portraits using a prime 90mm portrait lens and photographing on Black and White film (Ilford FP4 125)

Black and White imagery can evoke more emotion due to the viewer not being distracted from colour but just to the simple compositional values and sharp focus on the subject matter . . . however this being an experimental brief I have taken steps within a majority of my black and white portraits to incorporate colour via layering textures to see if this opinion can be argued.

This is my Contact Sheet of the Portraits of People I Photographed in South Africa, created via scanning the original negatives.

This is the original scanned image direct from the negative

Edited Image via Lightroom

Texture applied via Photoshop

Experimental Digital Imagery using Layered Textures

Originality

FAILURE is seen as a 'lack of achievement' however through failure comes SUCCESS

"LEARN from your mistakes and PUSH BOUNDARY LIMITS"

Before combining two of my own photographs I have decided to experiment with layering textures over a variety of both my South African images and my recent images taken from the shoreline of Liverpool at Crosby Beach.

All textures used have been sourced from the web, in particular from these two sites who offer free usage of textures :-)

http://best-textures.deviantart.com/

http://punk-rose.com/freebies/textures/

Further Inspiration via Email

Since the beginning of the BA (Hons) Course I have signed up to many artistic email newsletters.

The newsletters have aided my knowledge immensely into other contemporary photographic artists and given me a great source of inspiration into different styles and approaches in regards to photographic media production and workflow.

Below are the logo's from my favourite web locations to which continue to provide me excellent references for inspiration:

Photography Art Cafe

thephotographybiz.com

tips, tricks, tutorials, comment and insight on the business of photography

Yesterday I received a email from Titled: Surreal photography by ƒenk

The above images from the artist who goes by the name of fenk (who's real name has not been disclosed on his/her flickr account) http://www.flickr.com/photos/fenk/ have inspired me to experiment with combining both my seascapes from South Africa with my recent seascapes from Crosby Beach to hopefully re-invent imagery from two completely contrasting area's of the World.