Aspirations for the future.

My aim for the future it to become a primary school teacher. I have more work placement lined up at the Sir Harold Hillier arboretum education centre, I did my work placement here over the Easter break but with the placement I have lined up I will be able to work with school classes coming for education days.

During this placement I will also be searching for teaching assisting jobs to start work in September. Hopefully I can build up enough experience as a teaching assistant to get onto a good course so that I can achieve all my qualifications to become a fully qualified teacher (FQT) with a PGCE.

I still love photography and it will always be a part of my life as a personal passion and hobby. I already have tickets lined up to go and see an exclusive Sebastiago Salgado exhibition and interview in Somerset House at the end of this month.

In a World of Grey

For this university project I created work about my depression. My final piece consisted of one large print and a small catalogue to accompany it. Here are the images included from my final pieces and the piece of text that I wrote for it.

 

 

Rooted to the ground I am paralysed in a state of loneliness,

A solitary evergreen in a fog of depression,

Consistent and unwavering I change not with the seasons,

In an world of grey I wait for the sunlight.

The landscape is my therapy, when in downwards spiral, unable to sleep but almost paralysed in bed, I force my feet to the ground and go for a walk. I relate to the solitary trees I encounter, they are a physical representation of my emotional state. Taken in the blue-grey light before sun rise, surrounded by the still and quiet atmosphere amongst mist and frost, I took my self portrait.

Botanicals

This project was originally inspired by botanical illustration. I began taking simple images of flowers at different stages of growth that I would display as triptychs, but as the project developed I got more obsessed by my subject and it developed into a more personal journey through my exploration. My final piece was a large A3 book, it began with documentary images of the plants as they grew throughout my home and progressed to images of dissections that I made and arranged. My book ends with the final presentation of the flowers as sets of triptychs. This is the piece of text that introduces my book:

I have always had a love of plants and the natural world. As a child I was forever collecting treasures on family walks; leaves, feathers, petals, seed pods, twigs, pebbles, whatever had caught my eye or was new. I developed a fascination in how things worked, starting with the plants I had found; learning that all plants are made up of the same essential elements but each of these can come in different forms and colours.

Taking inspiration from the many old books of botanical illustrations in my home, I set about photographing some of my favourite spring flowers. This book is a document of my journey through this work; allowing the plants to grow, flower, and die all around my home.

I dissected the flowers, comparing different forms, trying to understand the biological benefits of the layout, and then using the beautiful disassembled flowers I created new images which feature in my work.

My book ends with the final presentation of the flowers in a series of triptychs. I cut the best flowers early to photograph them closed or in bud, keeping them alive so I could capture them at different stages of the flower development. Accompanied by their latin name they finish my work and lead me toward summer.

Morag Macdonald

As part of our professional contexts module, we had a visit from Morag Macdonald. She was to help people with their professional website and give professional careers advice.

Google Analytics:
– homepage should include text (website description)
– make sure the ‘homepage’ title is for the navigation page, not the landing page
– page ranking – number and quality of links to a page help to improve this

Website Advice and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
– make links within your site and get people to link back to your site to improve ranking
– keep your blog on your site and keep updated
– google web crawlers check your website so changing and updating your content will improve ranking
– write a website description with key search words to help get found
– split up key words and page and image titles across pages, write page descriptions
– submit website to google maps with relevant images
– use ‘alt tags’ on best images with buzz words

Alternative (alt) text:
– add alt tags to best or most important images when uploading them to the website, this will allow them to show when key words are searched in google images or bring up your website in search results.

Some More Important Advice:
– check the limitations for characters in web description in Google Etiquette
– make sure all information is relevant
– by attracting the right clients and getting more clients you can grow your business to a point where you can charge the fees you deserve
– make sure you look like the best option for your area
– scale back paid marketing activities, think of new and memorable “gorilla” marketing techniques
– design memorable “leave behinds”, not just a business card the people will forget, make it personal.
– learn how to use LinkedIn affectively

I found this workshop incredibly useful, although I do not want to become a professional photographer it was interesting to find out how google analytics work and how to better my website and professional presence online. I have written myself a website description using words that I think represent my work well and that may be included in peoples search results:

Chloe Wood specialises in soft, quiet, landscape photography and has recently exhibited her work in a university degree show. She enjoys working with natural and organic materials in a documentary style producing emotive and textural images. Based in the New Forest, her gentle nature and still life photography is suited to gallery spaces. 

Book Binding

At the end of last year, for my second year exhibition, I hand stitched and put a hard back cover on my own book for the first time. I really enjoyed the book making process and have been working towards making books for my projects this year.

Hayley Branson, a former student, has been coming in through out the year to help with book binding workshop. This has been really useful as although I am already quite comfortable with the book binding process, she has been great at giving guidance and extra tips on how to improve.

Work Placement

I completed my work placement for my professional contexts module at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens Education Centre from the 4th-19th April. I found this placement through one of my projects; because I wanted to take portraits of trees I had decided to get in touch with and take my photographs at an arboretum and through this I found the Hillier Gardens and their education centre.

Although this was not photography related, it is relevant to the career that I am looking to go into, primary school teaching.

I worked at the education centre over the Easter break, helping out with the activities they had for children to take part in. The activities I was involved in were Egg Dyeing, and Pond Dipping. The egg dyeing was more of a fun arts activity than an educational one, but I really enjoyed the days that I spent pond dipping as they were more educational and I too learnt a lot.

I am hoping to get more work experience with the education centre once I finish my degree next month. Because they will be back in term time rather than the Easter break this will give me the opportunity to work with the school visits that come for education days relating to their curriculum. This will be invaluable experience to help me get a job in teaching and progress to achieve my qualifications.

Jem Southam

I was really disappointed that I was not able to make the guest lecture by Jem Southam as he is one of my all time favourite photographers. I find his work incredibly inspiring and have often researched his work for help in my projects. This year his project “Red River” gave me great inspiration for my work in my first project, both with my photographs and with ideas for book layouts.

These are a few of my favourite images from his “Red River” book:

My Website

I started building myself a website for my photography work in my second year and was pleased with the progress that I made. This year I have been improving it, adding my new work and trying out different layouts. I am currently using format.com to build my website, the only downside that I can see at the moment is the lack of customisation to pre-made themes and the limited options for type face. Other than these small elements I am pleased with the website I have produced seeing as I am not a graphic designer.

I am looking forward to my workshops to do with professional online presence so that I can get ideas and pointers on how to improve this further. I am still continuing to add new work and play around with positioning so that I am completely happy.

My website is currently at:

chloewphotography.com

and I have set up an email through my website as well

David Spero

This week we had photographer David Spero in university to give us a lecture about his work.

Settlements – 2004- 2010:

This project is a record of self built low impact structures in ecological communities in the UK. The work started as a series of topographic views of the dwellings in their environments but as his project progressed it also became about the people who lived there and chose that way of life, he then started to take portraits and interior images.

Spero became interesting in the complicated rules and regulations that these people had to abide and looked into different planning permission policies and the ideas of low impact and sustainable living.

 

Ball Photographs – 2001- Present Day:

This project began with him photographing the night sky, a grand image of the heavens and earth together. Spero collects bouncy balls and after looking at the constellations he decided to playfully arrange these different sized and colour balls in his home in different formations to photograph.

Spero is drawn the temporary places and this is where he chooses to create his instillations. This project went through lots of development, changing plans and playing with perspective, he experimented with using mirrors to emphasise these strange ideas of perspective.

 

 

Max Creasy

This week Max Creasy came to give a guest lecture at the university. He introduced the lecture by looking at the work of Roe Etheridge and Viviane Sassen, discussing ideas of the playing with different visual language and the use of light in photography.

Creasy’s photography is inspired by the work of Jeff Wall and the ideas of taking away truth and reality from photography and replacing it with constructs.He posed questions to us like “When you simulate an object, what does the real one represent?” and “If nothing matters, then how do we make sense of anything?”.

By simulating the illusion of light he plays with his understanding of pictures, representation and logic to question the relationship between a whole range of matter. Creasy also plays with the pairing of image and text as well as order to make you read the photographs differently. He used the automatically generated camera file number and matched it with the same sequence of digits from the filing system of a library. This correlation between subjective readings and numerical references, Creasy investigates how we order the different matter in our lives to produce meaning.