I have at last finalised Assignment 6, producing two slideshow sequences, one viewing the ford from the east, the other from the west. I have decided to keep both sets not least because of the different ways the light has changed between them over the year. When it came to editing, I decided that I would use nearly all of the photos that I took over the year – each time I went out I took multiple shots of each view. The ones that have fallen by the wayside are a few that I found on review to be out of focus. What I think has happened with these is not that they were not focused properly (though that cannot be ruled out given that the camera I used throughout, my digital Leica, can only be focused manually) but that the aperture changed. Throughout I shot at f/16 to get a reasonable depth of field (the maximum available on the particular lens I have been using) but for a few I suspect I inadvertently used a larger aperture as the shots in question seem to be in focus for objects close to the camera but not for those more than a couple of metres away. There were also a couple taken early on for which I set up the camera in the wrong position. I had not then got into a proper routine of making sure I put the tripod in the same place every time. As it is, the first couple of shots for the view to the west are in a different position, the opposite side of the road to that from which all the others were taken. That position was more in the road and so vulnerable to passing cars, meaning that at the least I would have to move the camera out of the way each time someone drove past. The other side of the road offered a bit more shelter and room to avoid being run over! I have kept those shots because they themselves represent an element of transition, for the project itself as it developed as opposed to the environment within which I have been working.
Another similar element of transition is also present in the final work in so far as slight shifts in position of the camera are evident throughout. Although I settled into putting the tripod into particular positions, using certain trees by the side of the road as markers, and always set the tripod itself to the same height (I have in fact barely used this particular tripod, a lightweight travel one, for anything else all year, using a more heavyweight one for the other assignments to accommodate the larger cameras I used on them – 4×5 for Assignment 5 and a medium format Hasselblad on Assignment 3) there are nevertheless shifts in camera position from shoot to shoot, and sometimes between individual shots. Most of these I expected to be quite subtle but some are rather more noticeable.
The combination of lots of images and substantial soundtrack means that the resulting mp4 files are quite large exceeding the limit for my free (cheapskate!) account with Vimeo so I cannot post them there, even without the soundtrack. As a result, I cannot include a link now. For the purposes of submission to my tutor I am simply going to have to send the source files which can then be run using Quick-Time (or Windows Media Player, or whatever). In a way this suits well given that I have agreed with the composer that the audio version will be accessible only by my tutor.
I have tried embedding a silent version of the slideshows into this blog post but without success. I fear the file sizes are still too large.
Returning to the question of quality that I touched on in my previous post, on reflection I am not sure I have much more to add. The end results are, I have to confess, perhaps a bit too long running to almost 20 minutes each. That said I am not sure that anything shorter would really do justice to the project, and the amount of time spent on it, nor give an adequate sense of the nature and extent of the changes that do occur here over the space of a year. Being able to distil everything down to, for example, one emblematic image for each season would have worked but because there was so little real snow here last winter there is not really anything that would stand alone to represent winter. As it is, blink and you could easily miss the few most wintery shots that I did manage to get when there was a mere sprinkling of snow for one day only below about 100 metres above sea-level.
Having played through the sequences a number of times now I remain happy with the choice of music, which anyone can listen too in full on the composer’s Bandcamp page (link below).
I think perhaps the most important thing that I take away from this project has been the discipline of concentrating on a specific location over a prolonged period of time and observing it closely, watching how it changes, registering the nuances of light, vegetation, water level, changes in weather, and so on. This is not something that I would normally be aware of in such a focused way. Certainly, I do notice seasonal, weather related, and other changes here on a regular basis because, if nothing else, I walk this way with my dog nearly every single day. Taking a camera to a particular location on such a regular basis (at least once a week on average, and a few times on consecutive days to record more sudden changes in water level in the burn after periods of heavy rain) though introduces a much greater degree of concentration and awareness. It gives a structure to, and produces a record of, those otherwise casual observations. That alone, I feel, makes this project and the experience of it, valuable as a learning exercise.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 