I started out watching the "Shock of the New" on YouTube and then for a third time sat through the excellent BBC series "Genius of Photography", a good reminder in these days of all that is good about the beleaguered institution. I always see new things that I had missed and get a good jolt of encouragement from these videos. I also finished reading "Criticizing Photographs" by Terry Barrett, something I found rather uninspiring and soulless. The books content was good and the information presented of great value, it was simply the turgid style and sense that he could have said what was needed in a third of the space used that let it down for me. Perhaps this was a case of reading a textbook that is designed to support study rather than be a bed time read. It'll find a place on my reference shelf and undoubtedly come in useful when I need to do some more considered and advanced writing about photography:
The rest of my time was spent trying to get my head around the photographs I have taken at the Oktoberfest using the creation of a book as a vehicle for selecting, sequencing and contextualizing the material. This was a hard but pleasant task to complete. I deliberately adopted quite a strong design and narrative stance for each of the two books I have so far pulled together and asked the OCA community to help by commenting. The comments were as varied as the people, some loving the chaos of the packed multi-image first volume, others preferring the second with its more measured pace and fewer images. In both cases I received a huge amount of useful advice, feedback, and suggestions, all of which I am going to mull over and then invest into a third and final volume that will balance the two approaches and perhaps introduce a few new ideas. In the mean time, book number 1 arrived back from the printers:
As I expected it looks better in the flesh than on the screen, the jarring effect of two images blending into one another is somewhat mitigated by the gutter, but I do see the point that I need more space for some of the images to breath and avoid overwhelming one another. This arrived 2 weeks sooner than I expected, hopefully the same will be true of the second volume. Having both in hand will be very handy when designing the third.
By the weekend I was fit again and able to join the land of the living once more, which in my case meant the land of the nerds, I spent the weekend rejigging my digital darkroom. As someone firmly wedded to Digital photography the stability, performance, and quality of my editing setup is as important to me as having a decent camera and lenses. My desktop is a 3 year old (then) top of the range HP machine with 8GB of RAM, a couple of 1TB internal drives, and an Nvidia GTX 260 graphics card. It has been getting slower and slower as each new software upgrade arrived and the size of my RAW files grew. So on Saturday afternoon I increased the memory to 16GB and installed a new boot drive, a 240GB SSD. Swapping the boot drive to the very much faster solid state device meant a complete rebuild of the OS and re-installation of all software. This took the better part of Saturday and Sunday, but left me with a substantially quicker system. I was also able to reorganize my storage, so that the 2 x 1TB in the machine now carry all my personal data and trip based photography, whilst a 4 x 1TB RAID 5 external disk array carries my day to day photography. This then enabled me to change my second external drive array a 2 x 2TB RAID 1 array to a RAID 0 backup device for the rest of the system. I now have software running that backs up all my data to this array. I started the backup 2 days ago, still going, 2TB copied already.
OK, overkill, I know, but I am a belt and braces man when it comes to my photographs, they are very precious to me. Hopefully this upgrade will now keep me going for another 2 or 3 years before I do something stupid and install Windows 8.
Otherwise, I am turning my thoughts towards getting back to the more prosaic elements of the course, completing some of the projects that really should come before assignment 2 and thinking about the future. Today I learned something from the student forum that I am not to sure about. I did not expect the final year courses to change from the current YoP and Advanced, however, a complete overhaul is planned for the 2013/14 academic year. This is troubling me on two fronts, the first is that I was expecting to complete this course late spring/early summer and do not really want a large break prior to starting a new course. However, I could fill the gap usefully by either slowing down on this course or even adding a further Level 1 or 2 to my studies. I have had in the back of my mind the Visual Culture or Western Art courses to supplement my rather rudimentary knowledge of both. The latter would be a fun way to spend the winter, especially in a city with such a rich artistic heritage as Munich. I need to ponder this - after watching the Shock of the New I have a renewed interest in the Arts beyond Photography.
My second concern is more worrying to me and that is the split of the Year 3 courses from two into three elements, with one third being portfolio development (for want of a better term) , the second being a theoretical study, and the final part being professional practice. The first two elements I have no issue with, it is the last one that I am not sure about. I am not interested in becoming a professional photographer, the loss in income would be too great and starting again at the bottom at my age is not why I started with the OCA. I am in this to keep myself fresh and to develop an art practice that I can carry forward as a personal sideline to my normal working life. OK, it might be nice to make some money, but that is not my motivation. The notes I have read about this element of the course talk a lot about legal issues, business practices, and positioning oneself within the photographic business. The question is, in what country, UK law and practice is of little interest to me, the German attitude to photography, both legally and culturally is very different to that of the UK. I need to dig a little deeper here and make a call on whether to try and cling to the old model or go with the new. I just hope the OCA takes on board the multinational base of its student body and avoids the UK centricity of the current level 2 courses in designing the new level 3 curriculum.
Otherwise, I am turning my thoughts towards getting back to the more prosaic elements of the course, completing some of the projects that really should come before assignment 2 and thinking about the future. Today I learned something from the student forum that I am not to sure about. I did not expect the final year courses to change from the current YoP and Advanced, however, a complete overhaul is planned for the 2013/14 academic year. This is troubling me on two fronts, the first is that I was expecting to complete this course late spring/early summer and do not really want a large break prior to starting a new course. However, I could fill the gap usefully by either slowing down on this course or even adding a further Level 1 or 2 to my studies. I have had in the back of my mind the Visual Culture or Western Art courses to supplement my rather rudimentary knowledge of both. The latter would be a fun way to spend the winter, especially in a city with such a rich artistic heritage as Munich. I need to ponder this - after watching the Shock of the New I have a renewed interest in the Arts beyond Photography.
My second concern is more worrying to me and that is the split of the Year 3 courses from two into three elements, with one third being portfolio development (for want of a better term) , the second being a theoretical study, and the final part being professional practice. The first two elements I have no issue with, it is the last one that I am not sure about. I am not interested in becoming a professional photographer, the loss in income would be too great and starting again at the bottom at my age is not why I started with the OCA. I am in this to keep myself fresh and to develop an art practice that I can carry forward as a personal sideline to my normal working life. OK, it might be nice to make some money, but that is not my motivation. The notes I have read about this element of the course talk a lot about legal issues, business practices, and positioning oneself within the photographic business. The question is, in what country, UK law and practice is of little interest to me, the German attitude to photography, both legally and culturally is very different to that of the UK. I need to dig a little deeper here and make a call on whether to try and cling to the old model or go with the new. I just hope the OCA takes on board the multinational base of its student body and avoids the UK centricity of the current level 2 courses in designing the new level 3 curriculum.
I'm amazed how busy you've been being ill!! You sound upbeat though.
ReplyDeleteThanks Catherine, I am just not the type to sit around and do nothing but watch the TV, well not for very long at least. Having a few days confined to the house that were totally unplanned opened the door to do something that had been in the back of my mind but for which I had never had the bandwidth. After the summer of 12 hour days a few down days was such a luxury even if walking up the stairs was still an effort.
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