Week 4 PHO703 Alternatives to my usual way of working

I guess you would call my practice very much planted in the camera/lens based category,I’ve always enjoyed organic hands on areas such as printing,photograms,cyanoptypes etc but have shied  away from more computer base experimentation,I’m not even much good at retouching.

I did enjoy this experience though and decided to use it to explore the non lens based digital options available.The results are simple and varied .I learned alot about the process and other ways of seeing.Particulary I enjoyed the way time is altered when using google maps/earth.

Starting of as a tool to view potential sites I plan to photograph for my lens based project it soon became apparent that there was potential to investigate further how photography and time relate in story telling,taking some of the work we explored last module around time I was able to expand  my knowledge and ideas around this further.

Because of the nature of the technology quite minute movements from say 2D to 3D or even as simple as turning a street corner certain things appear,disappear or even reappear,usually people or other vehicles,in the most peculiar and unnatural way,out of sync.It reminded me of one of the first movies to use simple special effects A trip to the moon by  Georges Melies who used a simple technique by todays standard but at the time was groundbreaking called substitution splice.This is where the cameraman,in my case the google camera car stops filming something is replaced in my case again it could be a passing car into a clear space then filming commences giving the appearance of objects suddenly appearing and disappearing.Its a crude method of using time,in Melies on purpose and in the absence of sophisticated editing techniques of today and in Googles I guess because it just does not matter with the objective mapping the city,the idea of continuity is not important and as such it throws up lots of interesting scenarios.

Doug Rickard explored these in his book A new American Picture.In searching he found moments in time on street corners and remote roads of the US.

It’s not something I felt I would have been interested in too much before beyond a novelty value but can see it offers lots of ideas around time,revisiting and reusing imagery,I will be taking this further as my next two projects progress.

Below are 5 examples of how I have started to explore .