If I opt for the new courses, the earliest that they will commence is going to be Autumn 2013, perhaps even later. At my current rate of progress I expect to finish my current course by end of May or thereabouts, so another concern was a gap forming in my studies. I gave serious thought to adding a further course, but none of them seemed to add much that I could not achieve anyway. So decision time, how to manage my time and retain flexibility in Level 3 course choice.
I started studying with the OCA in 2009, my first blog entry for TAOP was on September 9th, that month I added a further 24 posts and completed 15 projects, phew... This is just over 3 years ago and since then I barely slowed down, the OCA studies becoming the mainstay of my personal time. I took longer over the the Landscape course, there was little choice with the workload it brought. Back to Social Documentary, my current feeling is that I need to slow down and pace myself a little more, read more, reflect more. I have a bookshelf of unread photography theory and piles of photobooks that would benefit from a more critical assessment. A second course would simply add distraction and pressure.
I am also finding that while I do enjoy photographing people, I am still at heart a photographer of the urban landscape I can include this in my social documentary studies, but it would only ever be a secondary element, given the emphasis of the course on people photography. I would like to do some personal projects that would expand the range of what I am currently doing, but also, perhaps, feed into the thought process I will have to follow to develop my practice for level 3. Recent OCA blog posts and Dewald's exploration of a growing Chinese city have sparked an interest once more in the marginal space around a city, where the urban gives way to the rural. When I started Landscape this was going to be a key element of my work, but my direction changed and I headed into the formal public spaces of the city instead. It'll also do me good to get out and about camera in hand.
In the spirit of that exploration of different themes and also simply because it is that time of year I have continued to examine how I look at Autumn and what it means to me. It is a time of change and for me an almost spiritual time of renewal after the long heat of the summer. Enthusiasm returns and a desire to explore. In a previous post I got in close trying to create "colour fields" that abstracted the season. More recently I have expanded my view and looked at other elements of the season that resonate personally with me. The colour is beautiful, but that is not really interesting to me photographically. As they say, it has been done to death. What interests me is the light and how the light plays with the colour:
These three images were deliberately very dark, an attempt to capture the light filtering through the decaying canopy with the sun picking up blasts of colour. They are perhaps too dark, but not for me. These images are very representative of my view on the darkness of the oncoming winter, but the last blast of the summer sun.
More conventionally the light and colour of autumn, still brings out the cliche in me:
These are far more conventional views of the Autumn, but I was still looking for the light versus the colour, although both clearly interact.
My last of images for Autumn, before I expire from cliche overload, is something utterly different. In these images it is all about colour and specifically a very unusual contrast. Over the weekend we had a very early and very large snowfall. This created havoc in the parks as wet heavy snow landed on trees still burdened with leaves. Rather than fall through barren winter branches the snow settled and its weight pulled branches down, often to breaking point. The aesthetic affect, though, was quite magical. Normally the yellow leaves were the bright point in an Autumn image, now they were mid-tone at best or even the dark point. This created a very strange soft landscape of yellow and white
The most visually interesting areas were the pathways. The snow pulled the trees down to create virtual tunnels and the foot traffic melted the snow to expose the carpets of fallen leaves.
Particularly strange was the newly fallen leaves on top of the snow
I have never seen anything quite like this before and perhaps will not again or at least for a long time. It lasted for a day before the snow left,. In essence this is the magic of photography, that ability to preserve a moment and to reflect on what was and is no longer.
Autumn brings the new for me, as the old leaves fall, I gain new energy and purpose. I don't really do Autumn as a photographer, but there is something in the season that pulls me out into the fresh air. I now need to harness that energy into some personal work and start to think more deeply about what I do and why I do it...
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