Looking over the contact sheets I made following the second shoot for this assignment I am not sure they entirely work. Firstly I do not think I have quite enough good quality material: it turns out it is much harder than I anticipated to get a clear shot of the moving-light display. Nevertheless there are enough in order to be able to put together at least an attempt at what a better set might look like. Doing a reshoot, unless doing the whole thing from scratch again, would I suspect be quite difficult. I can already see from this first attempt that getting a sufficient degree of consistency is quite difficult, so I am not sure how well images from two or more shoots, put together, would actually form a harmonious whole.
It is also evident to me that a mix of the platform display and the on-train screen does not really work. For this experiment I have therefore stayed with just the on-board images for the sake of consistency, concentrating on the names of the stations through which the train passes. One accidental by-product of this is that all the images shared the same dashed light strips. This is significant to me for two reasons. One is that they recede into the background and in doing so point in the direction of travel, giving a pictorial, though static, impression of movement. The other is that they call to mind the sprocket holes on 35mm film negatives. I shot these digitally rather than on film but I think the effect is that the pictures carry within themselves a marker of their own artificiality, a self-referential reminder that this is a series of photographic images.
I have also taken one image out of the order in which they were taken, the last one in this sequence, as it seemed to offer, without having planned or intended it, a sense of the end of the journey. The first image in the sequence again just seemed, serendipitously, to form an appropriate starting point.
Thinking about presentation, as with the Sublime set for Assignment 1 my initial thought is that again a slide show arrangement might work quite well, the melding of one image into another adding something of a sense of movement. I will experiment!
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