my project
The project that I decided to pursue was street views, this meant I took pictures of all different streets in a 10 minute drive radius of my house. The images are inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher with their typologies as they show a contrast between objects that are all quite similar to each other however when they are all put in a typology next to each other there is quite a big difference. I am also inspired by some of Steven Shore's images from roads and streets, these are all quite random and once they are all in front of you, you realise how they are all completely different and contrast with each other. This is also what I am setting out to do with a typology of different roads as they are all similar in some ways but completely different in others so that you can see an obvious change in area between each batch. I have also decided that I am going to present the images in a simple way of putting them on a board with no spaces on it so that it can be a real comparison and show how different all of the images are.
RESEARCHING PHOTOGRAPHERS
I have researched some other photographers which have taken panoramic photos.
The first person I researched for this is Nick Waplington with his book "Other Edens", this book is of panoramic views all around the world however there is also a twist- he is in all of the panoramas and he is naked.
I quite like the concept of these images as I like how he has managed to take panoramas everywhere on his travels and have him in all of them. I think it is quite weird how he is naked in all of them however he doesn't actually show anything in the images as one of the images below with the pylons he is holding a sign in front of him. Most of the images with him in them are blurry as he probably can not see what he is taking a picture of.
The first person I researched for this is Nick Waplington with his book "Other Edens", this book is of panoramic views all around the world however there is also a twist- he is in all of the panoramas and he is naked.
I quite like the concept of these images as I like how he has managed to take panoramas everywhere on his travels and have him in all of them. I think it is quite weird how he is naked in all of them however he doesn't actually show anything in the images as one of the images below with the pylons he is holding a sign in front of him. Most of the images with him in them are blurry as he probably can not see what he is taking a picture of.
I have also looked at the panoramic pictures by Josef Koudelka. These are completely different to Nick Waplingtons images as Nicks images are all in colour whilst Josef's are in black and white. The images below are quite interesting, I like how some of them look really natural however the hole in the wall looks a bit weird as if it has been photoshopped as it is a weird place for there to be a hole. Another image is also the one on the bottom right, it looks like the dog at the front has been photoshopped in as it looks like it is from a cartoon.
Overall, I think that I prefer how Nick Waplington has taken all of his images in colour- out of these two photographers I think that is better as it seems to present more the environment in a positive way. I like how in some of Josef Koudelka's images they look like they are very well planned however they look really natural which is what I am looking for in my own project.
MY PHOTOGRAPHS
The photographs below were taken on my Iphone 4s, these images were to show the types of areas I was taking the panoramic views in and some background pictures for the area.
The images above were taken with the panoramic mode on the camera on my iphone 4s. Once I took the images I decided that I would only take panoramas on my camera as the quality of the panoramas above is quite poor and I wanted them to be of better quality.
My panoramas (final piece)
The images below are all images taken on my camera for the final piece. I like all of these images and how they have all came out. I am quite happy with the variation of the weather throughout the images as it shows what life is actually like.
addresses of the places above in order:
- Dead end Wricklemarsh Road- This image has the sun setting over the wall of the motorway which is very bright and lights up the image. There are multiple different houses in the image and different cars of different colours.
- Wricklemarsh Road Bridge- I like how this image is really eye catching due to all of the bars(railings) from the bridge, it also looks kind of disoriented as they look curved due to it being panoramic but I like it.
- After bridge on Rochester Way- This image shows the barrier between buildings and the embankment for the motorway which I really like and I think it also shows the difference between the buildings and then the greenery and trees on the side next to the motorway.
- Woolacombe Road- This part of Woolacombe Road shows the difference between the types of houses as on one side of the road it is 1930s inspired houses however on the other side of the road it is Victorian inspired houses with wooden beams on the front of the house.
- Eastbrook Road- This image is also quite contrasted with buildings on one side that are bricks and cream buildings and a field on the other that is filled with green, orange, yellow and browns.
- Hervey Road- There is quite a big difference between the size of houses in this road compared to the others in other images, there is also quite a big variation between the types of houses on each side of the world. One side of the road has more triangle shapes in the house whilst the other side of the road has houses that are quite square and conventional for a very large house.
- Merriman Road- This road is full of medium sized houses which are all from the same era with the same design and size.
- Harraden Road- The houses seem to be quite different with different extensions that are white/cream, there are also quite a lot of leaves on the tree and on the floor which are all orange, red and yellow.
- Hardy Road-This is when the area I was taking pictures in changed, this is shown very well by the complete change in architecture and how the size of the houses has changed from 2-3 bedroom houses to 4-5 bedroom houses from a different era. This image has quite a vast change from one side of the road to the other.
- Beaconsfield Road- This road seems to have more edwardian houses however on one side in the background you can see some flats that have been recently built.
- Humber Road- This road has an allotment in it which gives the image a bit more colour from the vegetation being green.
- Ulundi Road- This road has some really big houses on it and they all look uniform and exactly the same.
- Highmore Road- This road has the wall from Joan Roan School on one side and not that many buildings on the other.
- Vanbrugh Park Road West- This has an extremely large building on one side and on the other it has the road to Coombe Avenue
- Vanbrugh Park Road- The front gardens on this road are quite big with quite high walls so it is difficult to see the houses behind them, however they are of quite similar size to each other.
- Coombe Avenue- This road is of some buildings that were built around the 1980s/90s.
- Vanbrugh Park- The two images from this road were both with the Heath on one side and a big building on the other.
- Banchory Road- This is when there was another change in area, these houses have a lot of character even though they are a lot smaller.
- Dornberg Road- This road seems to only have about 5 houses as it seems like this road was made into a dead end when the A2 was built and cut through the middle.
- Dead end Craigerne Road- This is also another example of a road that was cut off due to the A2, these houses still seems to have a lot of character.
- Craigerne Road- This part of the road has some very interesting architecture on the right, there are 3 random victorian inspired houses in a row that are extremely narrow, they are probably not as thin as you think however they do look like really small houses.
- Bellot Street- In this street, all of the houses look the same and are all made out of the same materials until you get half way down where there have been flats built.
- Azof Street- This street also has a lot of character although they are mostly the same, the front doors are each owners individual taste of colour.
- Mauristius Road- This road has houses that are quite small and the only difference between them all is that some of them are painted whilst others aren't.
- Banning Street- This street is a fairly new road, this means that it is full of newly developed flats and building sites.
- Derwent Street- This street is quite an empty street as one side has a wall and the other side has the bottom floor of people's flat doors whilst the others are upstairs.
- Enderby Street- This street looks really odd and disoriented as I think I took this photo at a junction. I like how the part around the window is either a teracotta colour or magenta.
- Caradoc Street- This street seems to have a white band around the bottom of the house (about half a metre high from the floor.
- Braddyll Street- This street seems to be full of white picket fences on one side that are very well maintained however on the other side of the road they have not painted their fence which makes it look a bit scruffier than the rest.
- Gibson Street- This street also has smaller houses that are all identical apart from the colour of the front doors.
- Old Woolwich Road- This road has quite a variety of different types of buildings, some of these were extremely big building whilst others were a lot smaller.
- King William Lane- I thought this was a weird choice of road that I wasn't sure whether I should photograph it or not however I liked how it turned out with the bright blue garage doors.
- Hadrian Street- This road is another road that has a white border at the bottom of the building.
- Pelton Road- The last image has some houses that are painted white at the bottom and have a white picket fence at the front whilst all of the other houses are exactly the same.
presentation ideas
My first Idea:
I quite like the pin boards on the left for presentation, however I am a bit worried that it may detract from the actual images which is why I am thinking of having a plain pin board with white pins to hold the images on the board.
I do not know yet how many pictures I will take as they are panoramic, they should take up a lot more space per picture than a normal picture would take. I like how the second image down on the left is an extremely simple, normal pin board which I think is actually the best way for me to present my images unless I find some material to cover it with will not take away from the actual images. I was also thinking of having all of the images lined up underneath each other (like a paint sample sheet) to show the variation through different roads all in the royal borough of Greenwich. To conclude, I have decided that I am going to have a plain pin board with white pins to hold the images onto the board. |
My Final Idea:
I finally decided to display the images in an extremely simple way,this is having all of the images bunched up underneath one another so there is an endless stream of 35 photos. An example of this is shown above with my panoramic images above.
mY EVALUATION
To conclude, I am very happy with my final piece and how the images came out. I especially like how my images all have a white faint stripe down the middle of them from the sunlight, which is always from the direction of the middle of the street. I am also quite happy with the way I have presented my project as I think it is the best way to accentuate the images and show how streets really look in normal everyday conditions. This is shown even more by how only around ten of the images I have taken are when it is not raining whilst the rest of the images were taken with the great British weather against me and raining. I am extremely happy with the quality of the images and how well they came out as I was worried that I would not be able to hold the camera at the correct height all the way round so that it was a full 360 degree view that joined together at either end however I did manage which made me quite happy with the result.
I was quite surprised with how well the project came out considering at the beginning it was quite difficult for me to decide what I was going to do as my project, I wanted to do something that really meant something to me and was local to me so that I could do it within the time limit given. This is when I came to the conclusion that I had to photograph my local community, the next step for me was to decide in what way I was going to take the images, what they were going to be of and what type of category they would fall under. I then came up with two ideas of taking pictures of the local area normally or the second idea was to make panoramic 360 degree images from the middle of the road to show what my local area really looks like on an everyday basis. I then had a conversation with my teacher Mr Nicholls and he informed me of two panoramic photographers to do research on. These images were from the book “Other Edens” by Nick Waplington- this was the photographer who was in all of his own panoramas and in every single one of them he is naked- this was only from research that I knew this as the images I found by him either just had the top of his head in it and the other image he is holding a sign to cover himself. The next photographer that I researched was Josef Koudelka, these images were extremely different to Nick Waplington’s however I seem to like them both and thought mine would be placed right in the middle of both of these ideas.
Before I took my main images I went to the areas I was going to photograph and took some normal images on my Iphone which I looked at and then decided whether they look good or not. On all of the images I thought they were good enough so I took a panorama in every location that I went to. I decided that it is better to take the panoramas and decide at a later stage that they were not good enough rather than not take it and not have enough images to make a good sized typology. The images were taken on a variety of days, these days were Thursday, Friday and Saturday this means I did not purposefully take the images on a non-busy day when there was no traffic, it was actually quite challenging in some of the roads to do a panoramic view as there were a few cars however I did manage to complete the project at the roads that I wanted to without getting myself run over or holding up any traffic. This was the only thing about my project that I found a bit annoying as it meant it also limited the roads that I could take pictures on as I couldn’t do it on really busy roads.
I think without knowing, I made my project extremely personal to me. I did the project in the form of a typology which I really enjoyed, I then decided to take pictures of the local community and how the houses have varied over time in my local area. This is very closely linked to architecture, which is something that I really love and have been interested in for a very long time. I thought of this after I saw my finished pictures and then thought that I must have done this subconsciously as I am quite sure it was not by chance.
Overall, I think the whole project came out really well and I think the images would not look as good if the photographs were not laid out in the way that they are as it really shows the difference and the similarities between all of the panoramic views. I think that my project would have looked even better if the weather was more on my side and that it wasn’t raining the whole time so that it showed the brighter side of the areas in a happier way rather than the images I have which look quite dark and depressing with it raining (except for the first batch I took when it was sunny). Another way I think I could have improved this project was to go further afield and take more panoramas from other areas to show more of a difference in the architecture. I am not 100% sure what I would like to do for my next project, however I have been thinking about doing another typology as I quite enjoyed doing this one but instead possibly doing it as a possible flip book and take a picture from the same place on hour intervals from just before the sun rises to just after the sunsets and it gets dark.
I was quite surprised with how well the project came out considering at the beginning it was quite difficult for me to decide what I was going to do as my project, I wanted to do something that really meant something to me and was local to me so that I could do it within the time limit given. This is when I came to the conclusion that I had to photograph my local community, the next step for me was to decide in what way I was going to take the images, what they were going to be of and what type of category they would fall under. I then came up with two ideas of taking pictures of the local area normally or the second idea was to make panoramic 360 degree images from the middle of the road to show what my local area really looks like on an everyday basis. I then had a conversation with my teacher Mr Nicholls and he informed me of two panoramic photographers to do research on. These images were from the book “Other Edens” by Nick Waplington- this was the photographer who was in all of his own panoramas and in every single one of them he is naked- this was only from research that I knew this as the images I found by him either just had the top of his head in it and the other image he is holding a sign to cover himself. The next photographer that I researched was Josef Koudelka, these images were extremely different to Nick Waplington’s however I seem to like them both and thought mine would be placed right in the middle of both of these ideas.
Before I took my main images I went to the areas I was going to photograph and took some normal images on my Iphone which I looked at and then decided whether they look good or not. On all of the images I thought they were good enough so I took a panorama in every location that I went to. I decided that it is better to take the panoramas and decide at a later stage that they were not good enough rather than not take it and not have enough images to make a good sized typology. The images were taken on a variety of days, these days were Thursday, Friday and Saturday this means I did not purposefully take the images on a non-busy day when there was no traffic, it was actually quite challenging in some of the roads to do a panoramic view as there were a few cars however I did manage to complete the project at the roads that I wanted to without getting myself run over or holding up any traffic. This was the only thing about my project that I found a bit annoying as it meant it also limited the roads that I could take pictures on as I couldn’t do it on really busy roads.
I think without knowing, I made my project extremely personal to me. I did the project in the form of a typology which I really enjoyed, I then decided to take pictures of the local community and how the houses have varied over time in my local area. This is very closely linked to architecture, which is something that I really love and have been interested in for a very long time. I thought of this after I saw my finished pictures and then thought that I must have done this subconsciously as I am quite sure it was not by chance.
Overall, I think the whole project came out really well and I think the images would not look as good if the photographs were not laid out in the way that they are as it really shows the difference and the similarities between all of the panoramic views. I think that my project would have looked even better if the weather was more on my side and that it wasn’t raining the whole time so that it showed the brighter side of the areas in a happier way rather than the images I have which look quite dark and depressing with it raining (except for the first batch I took when it was sunny). Another way I think I could have improved this project was to go further afield and take more panoramas from other areas to show more of a difference in the architecture. I am not 100% sure what I would like to do for my next project, however I have been thinking about doing another typology as I quite enjoyed doing this one but instead possibly doing it as a possible flip book and take a picture from the same place on hour intervals from just before the sun rises to just after the sunsets and it gets dark.