Illustrated project proposal

My personal investigation-

To create a visual record of the effects that humans have had on nature and rural landscapes, then photograph urban landscapes so that i can compare them to each other in terms of what man-kind has done to the earth, and if humans have had a good effect on earns natural beauty. Instead of just plainly photographing rural and urban landscapes I plan to use macro photography to get close and capture details of different elements in the landscapes too. So for example, within rural landscapes i would focus on the texture of trees and flowers. Within in my urban shoots will focus closely on the flaws within infrastructure, like cracks.This allows me to capture the whole landscape and also zoom in on certain details of the landscapes that interest me. Landscape has always interested me so I'm using this project to try and show my best work photographing rural vs urban landscapes and so that I can experiment with macro photography.

Macro photography ideas within rural landscapes-Tree branches, Water droplets, Grass, Spider webs, Flowers, leafs, water droplet with flower, bark off trees, soil, bugs, birds, wild animals (foxes).

Macro photography ideas within urban landscapes- Broken glass/windows, cracks in pavements, paint cracking, holes in walls.

Background-

In summary the aim of this project is to show that even though both rural and urban landscapes have their beauty, they both do have downsides to them equally. So thats why i intend to spilt the ten shows and have five for each. All of these photos will equally have the same intention in what I'm focusing on. So for example on my rural shoots, i will take photos of the wholes landscape and then take more zoomed photos on different aspects of the environment I'm in that i find interesting. And so in urban landscapes i would take a couple of bulging in one photo, then i may zoom in on one particular aspect of a building that fascinates me, e.g a broken window. So as I'm taking photos on urban and rural, i don't want to go off on a tangent and not have a consistent body of work, so i will try to connect the different types of shoots together, by the wholes macro aspect on each environment and taking the environment as a whole and then zooming in on interesting parts.

I have decided to focus on landscapes, both urban and rural landscapes. By rural i mean the countryside, forests/woodland and just nature in general. And by urban i mean cityscapes and small towns/ built up areas (housing). I find landscape photography interesting as landscapes, both rural and urban can look beautiful  if you take a photo well. Also its very interesting to just go to these different type of environments and just take photos, as everything is already set up and within rural landscapes you can find a number of things to photograph from various different angles to achieve different effects by using different techniques. And I will also use my macro lens to further look into the environment/landscape i'm in. For example if I took a photo of a rural landscape that had a tree in it, I would use my macro lens to capture the small detail on the tree branches and bark or the leafs. Within urban landscapes i could photograph small cracks within the pavement to show that even though the is wholes artificial environment has been built up and can be beautiful its still flawed and will eventually be destroyed if not taken crd of properly by humans. On the other side, with rural landscapes naturally without humans, they don't actually need to be taken care of. So its like I'm taking photographs inside of photographs. 

As its autumn I would like to capture the landscapes during different types of weather and times of day. Right now the weather is very unpredictable so i will have to try and plan my shoots according to the wether, as overcast days are obviously very dark. So for example, if I'm capturing woodland it would be very dark if it were an overcast day and my photos wouldn't came out as well as they would on a brighter day. I would prefer to do my shoots on urban environments during overcast and maybe even rainy days, as I will be editing them blank and white so it would just add more to the effect of there being no colour. And i would capture rural landscapes on the brightest days. Then I would go back to the same place on a day when its raining or of a different time and cloudiness and take photos again but see the difference in the lighting and how the photos turn out, If they look better bright or better in dimmer, grey lighting. And to see how some macro photographs look with water droplets or dampness on the subject of the photos. For the shoots I would mainly travel around Harlow looking for different types of rural landscapes or woodland. And for urban i would just going into the main town centre. I would also travel to nature reserves and to London or north London (the river lee) to try and capture different urban and rural environments there. I would probably encounter more wild life near the river too, giving me a variety of subjects to photograph. 

I also plan to do a shoot where humans have tried to save the environment so that it isn't destroyed by human activities. For example there is a nature reserve by where i live, pardon wood nature reserve.  At this reserve they have wildlife that roam around the ares so they have rules that visits have to follow when they are there, like sticking to the path. So by doing this shoot, it will then conflict with the argument that I'm making saying that humans are destructive towards the rural environment, as a nature reserve is preserving that surrounding area so that it can be there for a long time.

My first shoot on rural landscapes, out of five would be typical woodland landscapes. So for this shoot i would go to this wood near my house which has quite high trees, the floor is just covered in leaves and has quite a few squirrels. I think that this wood would be appropriate for my firsts shoot as I know the area so I know what will be there, which is quite a variety or leaves and acorns for my macro and I, and as the trees are quite high, if I went at the right time when the suns above i could capture the suns rays coming through the tree canopy, For the second shoot I would do this when I'm back at college so I would have to plan it in a forest/wood type area near the college. So for my second shoot I would go to this wood land about 10 minuets walk away that has a small river, this would then allow me to capture a similar type of environment but it has different trees, a river and different wildlife.

For my first shoot on urban landscapes i would travel to Enfield town. This shoot would be more focused on the 'uglier' side of urban landscapes. So i would focus my photos on aspects like construction or the pollution within urban cites and then on the sides that i find interesting and beauty. I have some family that live in Enfiled/ ponders end, and right now ponders end is having quite a lot of re-construstion. Where my nan lives they are demolishing 4 tall flats so she's had to move around within these four flats whilst they take down every flat. The project had been going on for a couple of years now, but they have only just starting taking down the first one. So the last time i was there which was last week, i noticed that the first flat had been gutted out and this was visible through the white sheet. So hopefully yhid flat will still be there and in that state so that i could capture the demolishing of that flat as i do have some context on these flats because my grandma has lived there for around 20 years and this will allow me to convey a story around those photos. Also nearby my Grandma has an allotment plot and so i could go there with her to then show how even though Enfield is a very built up urban town, it still does have small areas of rural inside.

Photographer research-

Heather Angel

Heather Angel originally had a career in marine biology before she decided to become a freelance wildlife photographer. So far she has founded her own image library, Natural Visions, for marketing images of the natural world, and teaches seminars, workshops and gives lectures on photography. Heather has a passion for photographing animals, plants and macro subjects. So i found Heather through looking up macro landscape photographers, and once i had seen her work on macro photography i wanted to use it as an influence for some of my rural shoots, as i plan to take macro photos within the whole landscape. Also from looking at photos from Heathers seminar (in my glossary post) i then got an idea for one of my shoots, which was taking these elements from the environment and taking macro photos of them in a studio, so its soley just that object in the photo on a blank background. I found the photos that she had taken as quite abstract and so reminded of a previous artist i have searched, Imogen Cunningham.  In recent years, she has invested a lot of time working at Kew Gardens documenting the wildlife there for her book and exhibition Wild Kew and is currently working on a big project about floral structure. Major solo exhibitions of Heather’s work have been on show in London, India, China, Malaysia, and Egypt. Heather has been popular within wildlife photography in Britain for several decades, with her images appearing in magazines and books all over the world. As Heather photos are popular and consistent on wildlife photography, i chose her as an inspiration because her work has given me quite a few different ideas for my shoots. Her work has also been recognised by many awards in Britain and overseas.  Heather Angel was the first photographer that i had researched before i changed my project proposal to being about both the beauty and flawed side of nature and urban environments, so her work is more on the obvious beauty side to nature, compared to Ansel who shows nature in a slightly different way because his is more intensified and unrealistic, because if the audience was actually viewing what he had taken a photo of in real life, it wouldn't look anywhere near what it does in his photographs, where as in Heathers photos how she conveys the subjects of her photos its more natural and obvious. With exceptions to her macro photographs because those are more abstract and does take some time for the beauty to hit the audience.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams was a photographer, writer, lecturer and environmentalist, born in California 1902. As a child he didn't really fit in at school and so he was eventually tutored at home by his dad and aunt. However he did find a joy in nature. When he was 12 he taught himself to play piano, which then became his primary occupation until 1920. He then gave up music for photography, his parents gave him his first camera, a kodak no.1 box brownie. He then joined Sierra club which was vital to his early success as a photographer, as his first published photographers appeared in their 1922 bulletin. In 1927 he met photographer Edward Weston, whom i have researched for this project too, because i found their work a little bit similar in terms of what I'm doing for my project i chose to use Ansel Adams as one of my main inspirations because i found more relevance in his work to mine, as opposed to Edwards. After meeting the Group f/46 was founded in 1932, even though the grip was short lived, it brought the west coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. Adam started to struggle finically and so he was compelled to spend a lot of his time as a commercial photographer. Soon after he developed the famous 'zone system' of controlling and relating exposure and development, which allowed photographers to to visualise an image and produce a photo that matched and expressed that same visualisation. He has also produced some of the most influential books on photography. Because of Ansel's great interest in the environment and wilderness, his images were seen as symbols and veritable icons of wild America. Even though his black and white images were not truly realistic documents of nature, he tended to intensify  the psychological experience of natural beauty. The reason why i choose Ansel as one of my main influence for this project is because his work is what i intend to display within my rural shoots, because he conveyed the natural beauty within the environment but in a very invested way too. So when i do my shoots i will have Ansel's style of photography in my head for when I'm photography the beauty side to rural environments. However Ansel has been criticised for failing to include any sign of humanity within his work. For example Henri Cartier-Bresson commented that " the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees". So he was seen as a photographer of an idealised wilderness that no longer exists. Because of this i then decided to change my project proposal slightly, from being just about the beauty of nature, just like Ansel's photographs. To showing both sides of nature, the beauty and the "downside" which is mostly because of humanity. Out of all of the photographers that i have researched so far, i believe that Ansel Adams will be the influential of all of them for my rural shoots. I plan to edit my photographs black and white like Ansel's photographs because i think that the photos being in black and white gives of a more meaningful effect and the audience then focuses more on the deeper meanings of the photos.

John Davies

Davies was born in Sedgefield, County Durham, in 1949. He grew up in coal mining and farming communities, and this combination of open space and industry was to become a persistent motif in his creative work. His early life was spent living in industrial landscapes in County Durham and Nottinghamshire.

He studied photography, first attending Mansfield School of Art to complete a foundation course, then studying at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), graduating in 1974. Following this, he began working on long-term projects, seeking commissions and arts funding to support his work. He has worked closely with Amber/Side Collective on a number of commissions.

In 1981, Davies won a one-year photography fellowship at Sheffield Polytechnic, and he became senior research fellow at the Art School of University of Wales Cardiff (UWIC) in 1995.

He is known for producing large photographic prints of images produced from high vantage points, using traditional darkroom techniques. His work in the 1980s primarily used medium format cameras, and work from the 1990s a large format camera, although in recent years he has begun using dSLR and digital medium format cameras in his work as well. While his career began by producing traditional, but masterful, landscape images he quickly progressed to composition where the natural environment was juxtaposed against industrial elements impinging on it. This theme of industrialisation has become more prominent with The British Landscape his best-known body of work, and recent work in Mount Fuji, Japan (Fuji City), a meditation on the balance between nature and industry. He has also become involved in local politics, as his interest in the use of public space has been both personal and professional. The shift in subject matter also developed into a fascination with urban regeneration and work on this includes his Metropoli Project, City State, and Cities on the Edge, the latter of which he curated, in addition to contributing images of his own.

Davies' style was a major influence on the practice of noted art photographer Andreas Gursky.

Paul Grogan

Paul's photographic journey started in 1993 when he bought his first SLR camera and used it throughout his Design and Art Direction degree at Manchester Metropolitan University, learning all about film and darkroom printing. He eventually went onto photograph, develop and printed all of his  photographs used within his degree show. After graduation and carving a career out in the graphic design industry He found himself behind the camera again, but from an art direction perspective. This reignited his passion for capturing anything from fine art photos to wedding photography. He loved working with people so working as a Manchester wedding photographer was a joy for him, but also on commercial shoots. Especially trying to get people to relax in front of the camera. He always had a laugh with his customers and couple and build a rapport with them, as he believed you get the best photos when theirs trust and relaxation. As he's based in Manchester, it provides him with plenty of work, but he travels all over the country shooting weddings and or commercial projects. He uses the  fact that he's surrounded by an incredible range of geologically diverse landscape and spectacular cities and architecture. His favourite areas to photograph are  areas such as Manchester, Liverpool, the Peak District, Yorkshire Dales, Ribble Valley, Lake District Lancashire, east coast, and north Wales.

Illustrations-

All of those photos are illustrations that will hopefully be similar photographs to my shoots on rural environments and landscapes. I choose the first two photos because they go along with the idea of macro photography, that i would to use a technique in my shoots, especially my rural shoots. To me this photo aren't just normal macro photos on items of nature, because the way the photographer has captured these photos are different to how i would normally see a flower capture in macro style. The photographer has taken these photos in an abnormal angle for flowers. For example the first photo is taken from a ground view looking up to the flowers, this is something that i think would be very hard to achieve as these flowers are normally short and so for the camera that i would use, i wouldn't be able to fit it underneath the flowers and take a photo. So because of the difficulty that the photographer has put into the photo, it has interested me because i would like to take photos like this one however i don't think i would be able to. However i will try it if  come cross some taller flowers within a rural environment. The photo of the leaves in a shallow depth of field intrigued me because the leaves are in complete natural light from a dun ray tat has come through the canopy level and directly onto these leave. Which is in contrast to the background of the photo, which is a lot darker and less visible because of being out of the depth of field and being in the dark. I would like to try and recreate this photo because i like how its symbolising the light showing the natural beauty of the leaves making them stand out so that the viewers can really see the beauty. I included the bottom photo because i thought that it would be similar some of the photos that i would be taking whist I'm doing shoots within forest areas. This photo too has a bit of a shallow depth of field even though a lot of the photo is visible because of the even share of light throughout the whole photo, the foreground of the photo is till more in focus than the background, showing all of the detail on the trees in the front. At first this photo had a bit of a dark tone to me because the forest looks never ending like you would get lost within it. However because of the bright yellow flowers that are visible behind the second line of trees, it adds more of a happier tone and it looks like theres an opening behind the flowers because they don't really suit the rest of the area so there must be more flowers near this flower bush. All of these photos have inspired me in terms of the techniques that i am going to use within my multiple shoots, as i already have an idea of the places I'm going to shoot, i just need to have more of an idea of how to convey what I'm trying photograph but in an artistic way using different techniques to show how my work has been inspired by numerous artists, instead of me just going around taking photos and not taking into account who has inspired me to take theses photos in a certain way.

All of theses photos show the destruction the man made urban environment and the destruction and impact's it has had on the environment. These photos link to the other half of my project, which contrasts to the natural beauty of rural environments and landscapes because these man made infrastructures have been damaged by humans, they may have been built to look nice at some point but overtime that has decreased from various human activities, e.g vandalism. The top photograph is of a power plant, emitting air pollution directly into the environment, effecting carbon dioxide levels and the ozone layer. In addition to the pollution, all of that land that has been used to hold these power plants have been destroyed when they could've been used for faming or just stayed as natural untouched land. in my view i think that the whole subject of the photo is ugly as the power plant just doesn't look like it fits in view the surrounding environment of grass and trees. I choose the second photo because it shows how that small bit of the environment. the water, is left and all of the surrounding area has been taken up with infrastructure like block flat buildings and a train line bridge. this shows that because of the growing population we have had to resort to using as much land as we can just to fit houses for people to live in. The bottom photos show how if left and untended to, the majority of the infustructure that humans build will eventually start to root and become unappealing. Where as within the rural environment objects can naturally be fine for a long period of time without any help e.g a willow tree. By all of theses photos being in black and white, i think that it adds more of a serious tone to the photos and the meanings behind them, as this type of photography isn't focusing on the beauty of the subject, its focusing on the deeper meaning ad what the photographer is trying to show their audiences. So by having the photo in black and white, it makes the true meaning of the photo stand out more, as opposed to the audience foxing on something in the photo that looks appealing by its colour or vibrance. So from these photos they have inspired me on how I'm going to be taking my photos, and making me realise what i will actually be trying to convey. And that i will probably do the majority, if not all of my shoots in black and white, so that  can get the same effect of the seriousness of these photos.

Techniques-

Some of techniques that I intend to explore within this project are:

• Macro- close up photography that captures a high amount of detail so that I can show/capture further detail within the whole landscapes e.g. flowers, pavements.

• Aperture-depth of field- I would change from having shallow or deep depth of field depending on what I'm photographing and from what type of angle too. e.g. for a flower close up id have a shallow depth. If I needed to focus on something within the background or foreground of an city photo.

• Wide angle close up- I would use this technique for photographing things close to the floor that I e.g. a bug that I would have to capture up close but I still want a good wide angle for the background and it would also change how the bug appears in the photo. For urban i would use this type of angle to try and capture a wide street or again get a wide angle from being close to the street floor.

• Telephoto- A longer focal length than standard, and so gives a narrow field of view and a magnified image- I could use this to show the difference of an object that is far away but I could make it appear closer and magnified, my 70mm t0 300mm lens would help me with this.

• Ants eye view- Photographs from a low level, typically the ground. This angle would be used alongside wide angle close-up, but it can just be used alone without having to be wide angled, but again as its ant view it means the view from the floor upwards, so I could use this angle to look up from a forest floor up to the tree canopy's.

• Birds-eye view- This angle is the opposite of ants eye view, its looking down from high above the ground so that whatever is lower or on the floor would appear to be quite small, I could use this technique for looking down from the trees if there's a collection of trees together so I could get leading lines of trees to the floor.

• Sequencing- A series of images where the subject is captured in a successive motion-I would use the technique of sequencing if I saw a bird moving or a squirrel. Within a city i would try to capture a car sequence and the exhaust fumes going into the air.

• Silhouette-i would use silhouettes within the rural environment she I'm taking photos of trees or the canopy level of them, so looking up. As the sun would then make the photo brighter it will make it easy to contrast the darkness of the tree and its leaves wit the sky, which would then give me a silhouette effect. Or i could use it to show the outlines of buildings contrasting with the sky.  

For my edits I will also explore a variation of computer experiments and some physical images. For example, I would use a lot of colour splash and changing/editing multiple sections of the same photo in different ways, mostly for rural landscapes e.g on flowers. I would also use some black and white in some of my edits so that the photos look classic and that there's nothing like bright, vibrant colours distracting the viewers from the main subject of the photo. I would use blank and white for all of my full urban landscape photographs, as i think that for the viewers i makes it easier to see the most important things within the photograph.