It’s Victory for Harrison!

 

V FOR VICTORY !!!

They’ve all done it and we have admired them for it ! Winston Churchill…..Lewis Hamilton… John Lennon…Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….(?)

Ok maybe not the last one….

This week my friends, I can finally claim victory! My final piece for my college HND is finished, has been edited in Photoshop and Aperture and, as they say in Hollywood, in the can (not the can as in toilet, although the first few attempts have ended up there.)

And before you go scrolling to the bottom hoping to see it, well, I’m sorry to disappoint as you won’t find it there. Or indeed anywhere else on the blog. Not just yet anyway. I will put it on here after the final show has taken place, so be patient !

To say it has been a tough journey may be somewhat of an understatement. For those who regularly follow this blog (thank you, I love your faces), you may have read in previous blog posts that getting to this stage has been “eventful” to say the least. From starting out at the planning stage it was going to be an epic scene with forests and spotlights and American cars and great Hollywood lighting but it soon resulted in me having to come down from my lofty perch and the fantasy land that I live in most of the time (it’s great there by the way, you should stop by sometime), to the stark reality of a somewhat smaller scale scene with one camera, no lights, a very local location and my lovely neighbour as my model. Not quite Crewdson, but hey – we all have to start somewhere.

And here we are. I have a final image. I must say that I am very pleased with what I have. I find it very easy to be self-critical – name one photographer that isn’t – and throughout this project have constantly questioned myself; Is this the right idea? Have I chose the right topic? Am I good enough to do this? Should I have stuck with street photography? Why am I talking to myself……?

I think I have also learnt a lot about this type of photography too. It has certainly made me more appreciative of Crewdson. Sure – you could argue that he has an army of people to set up his locations for him and do his lighting etc. but he still has to have the initial idea, he has to perceive the first vision in his head of what he wants to portray. It may be why he is so meticulous when he on set. He know exactly to the millimetre how something should look because he has already seen it in his vision of the scene.

Going into my shoot, I had a vision of what I wanted my picture to look like and now, seeing the final version, it’s 99% spot on (it would have 100% but I hadn’t factored for a security light in the car park being brighter than the sun!). Getting to use a Hasselblad medium format camera was a blessing too. The picture quality is beyond expectation. (I’ll happily take a free one Hasselblad in return for this free advertising!)

Would I do this type of picture again? Absolutely. Definitely. In a New York minute. That’s not to say I would cheat on my first love of course! My first love will always be street photography but there is an overwhelming sense of achievement when working in this type of environment. Street photography gives you that hit of adrenalin when you are surrounded by people and the everyday but working on a landscape piece such as this is almost intoxicating. You have a this enormous blank canvas to work with and you control (almost) everything within it. I think I can understand why artists such as Crewdson and Jeff Wall et al. relish working with this form of photography. Every single item in the viewfinder is within your control. It is a mixture of still life and landscape photography coming together to make something truly incredible. What I wouldn’t give to be on set to see Crewdson at work…..

All I have to do is find someone with his mobile phone number….

Anyone?