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PDP – Blog and online diary.

This week I have been trying to get the initial inspiration for my new project that is titled Self Port-Trayal, the project is going to be about things that have happened to me in my life and I plan to portray them visually through photography. The initial ideas I am coming up with seem to include multiple versions of me in the same image and the ideas that I was having reminded me of a painting I saw when I happened to catch an American made documentary about the late actor Heath Ledger who died in the prime of his career. The documentary explained a lot about Ledgers mind state and how the pressures of being in the lime light had affected him quite negatively. An artist who was a close friend of Ledgers named Vincent Fantauzzo could see the effect this was having on Ledger and tried to depict his internal suffering in this portrait titled “Haunting”. His portrait reminded me a lot of the things I was thinking of doing and has given me some much needed initial inspiration.

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACCV1ifEKdo

This video from Youtube is a clip from a short interview with the artist at the unveiling of the portrait.

This week I have been researching many different artist and photographers but I have come across one photographer who has really inspired me, his name is Dave Hill. I first came across his work when I was researching on a website but I immediately recognized his style from work I had seen on the cover of one of the magazines he works for. Hill is one of the cover photographers for the American rock magazine, Alternative Press or AP magazine. Hill has worked with a number of alternative Rock bands, He has photographed some of the Biggest main steam rock bands such as My Chemical romance, Paramour, AFI and All American Rejects and some more underground new discoveries that are beginning to brake through. I love his style it is different and unique to him it has inspired me to really and step up my own Photoshop skill in the hope that if I keep on progressing maybe I’ll be able to make something that looks as visually stunning and achieve my own style.

This week I got an interview with an online TV company called MYTV. I met the owner of the TV company at a Paralympics celebration that I was a guest at, I got chatting to him when he was interview my friend who had been in the Paralympics last year. I explained that I was a media student and had a big passion for TV as it is still an area that I am quite interested in going into. I took his details and arranged to come down to the studio to try out as a presenter and just generally look around to see what they did. Going to the studio was a big eye opener, the organisation was a lot smaller than I had realised they didn’t even have a proper studio just a few cameras and a blue screen, I also didn’t really think that their crew was very professional I even ended up fixing their auto queue for them as they couldn’t work out how to use it. I can’t say I was overly impressed with the company but it was very interesting to see how things in the real world work and surprising in a way the amount of novices they had working for them but I enjoyed it none the less

http://www.mybrumtv.co.uk/

This week I have been starting to think about how exactly I am going to find my models that I will use in my work. Talking to friends who do the same sort of things that I do a number of them have recommended a site to me call net-model. This website is designed to allow photographers and model to set up online profiles and portfolios of work as well as send out casting calls for anyone who is interested in work. This website is good for me as it is mostly for people who are new to the industry and looking to build up portfolios so they will often work for little or no money. Personally I’m not sure I like the layout of the website and it seems quite dated but I will have to work with it and see if it works for me

I saw something on the news this week that made me smile, a photographer named Jill Greenberg was commissioned to do a portrait of the republican candidate Senator John McCain by the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Which on the surface seemed mad to me as I thought they would have known that Greenberg has very strong views against the republican party as she had done a whole series of images called “End Times” that depicted children crying to show how she thought they would feel if they knew the state of the world they where going to inherit. Personally I think that this is brilliant and I love when someone manages to stir up so much emotion in people through photography.

I found this video on Youtube that was posted by a person who obviously was very annoyed buy what Green berg had done, portraying McCain as a monster and even more amusing to me is how angry the news reader seems to be when I thought from a media point of view the news was meant to be impartial?

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNe_cNfEdzg

As a photographer I know it is very important to get your work seen by people, if I am going to have any sort of career in photography I am going to have to impress people with my work and have a way of showing it to them and also having a place that they can easily access it anytime and any place they want. That is why one of the things I have done this week is set up an online portfolio on the website Flikr. Flickr is really useful for someone like me because it means I can up load loads of high quality images to the site and share them with people all over the world. In a job situation this is brilliant because it means that I don’t have to leave my portfolio with the employer I can give them a web address where they can find and access all of my work when ever they want to. It also means I can send people examples of my work before they meet me to give them a good idea of exactly what I do.

Recently I have been finding it hard to find the right kind of models for my shoots, I just can’t seem to get on with the Net-model site and I just don’t think there are the right kinds of people using it that I’d like to work with. I had the site Model Mayhem recommended to me by a model I met when helping a friend out on a shoot, she told me that it was where she got most of her work from. So I checked it out and straight away I found it a lot more user friendly, the profile where well set out and easy to access and it was much easier to search for people in your local area or anywhere in the UK or worldwide. Like Net-model you can set up online portfolio of your work, message and talk to people and send out casting calls but the calibre of people using this site seems to be a lot higher! I also like the fact that you can reference the people you use who have also got a profile with the site this gave me away of seeing who was good to work with and you can build up a clear idea of the right people to be working with in your local area.

I also really like it because the site really gives you the ability to look at people who do a range of different jobs in the industry along with photographers and models you also have makeup artists, stylists, Photoshop wizards (as they call them) and photography organisations. This site has already really inspired me as it has given me a window to a whole host of peoples work which is of a really professional standard and has inspired me to really step up my game and make things as good as I have seen on this site.

As I’m finding out more and more it is so crucial for me to get my work seen by the out side world so as some research this week I when to speak to a friend of mine who owns an art gallery in Birmingham to get some advice on what he thought would be good for me to do and also talk to him about possible exhibition space.

I have known the owner of the number 9 gallery, Lee for a number of years now he has many contacts in the art world and is very knowledgeable and a good person to talk to. He told me about a number of places that would be good for printing in Birmingham and said that I should try selling my work over the internet, I showed him what I had been doing and he said that they reminded him of more abstract post card images and said that may be I should try marketing them as that and selling them as small postcards size prints. Exhibition wise he said he’d let me know if any space opened up but at the moment he had a full gallery exhibit of one artist and sculpture but he told me about a number of spaces in Birmingham that I could think of trying when I had my stuff ready.

As I keep saying I really need to get my work seen by the public and so far the profiles on websites that I have set up are helpful but they will only appeal to a small minority of people mostly in the industry, not the general media consuming public. This week I have been setting up a profile devoted top my photography on the website Myspace. This is really helpful to me as I can network with people all over the world and it is open for anyone to see and my name will come up on search engines like Google and MSN search.

So far I have managed to gain a friend following of over 300 people in the short time I have had the profile up and running and it is growing everyday. The work that I have posted up so far people seem to like and are asking to see more. This is probably the quickest and most effective way I have a the moment of getting my work seen and I can quickly see from comments on my profile and on my pictures what the general public think of my work.

This week as it is coming to the end of my project I have been creating a hard copy portfolio which contains prints of all my best work that I can take to show to possible employs and present to people I meet be they models, make up artists, stylists or even other photographers. I decided to make two separate portfolios for the moment as I feel there is a large difference between the work I did for the Self port-Trayal series and my pervious work and the newest work I have done for the University series which I think far surpasses anything I have done in the past. I didn’t really realise the effect that having a portfolio to hand could have until I met a male model call James Pasley who as soon as I got talking to him whipped out his portfolio and I could see straight away exactly what he had done and liked it and pretty much booked him on the spot. If the impression given off by a persons portfolio can be that strong on me I’m sure it will have the same effect on others.

Bellow are pictures of the portfolios of my photography work that I have now put together.

Now that I am right at the end of my project I need to really start think about what is next and what is my next step going to be. I know that I want to carry on with my photography and through my use of profiles I have set up on internet sites I have offers for work and people to work with. I think I need to carry on building up a portfolio of different work and carry on experimenting on my own as well as with other people.

One thing that I would like to do is set up my own website, I think that this would impress any employer and would also make my whole operation look a lot more professional. So this week I have been in talks with a friend of mine who is now a professional graphics designer and Photoshop wiz and she has agreed to help me set up my own website as well as spruce up my Myspace profile to make that look more professional.

I would also like a way of selling my work on the internet, taking the advice of Lee from gallery number 9 I have been looking in to and sorting out a traders account on the website Pay Pal which I would link to my Myspace or my website when I get it up and running so that people all over the world can order and by prints of my work and electronically pay for them