18/02/14
Cassiobury
Park is a nature reserve in Watford. The park is full of nature walks
around rivers, canals, woodland, grassland and even some swampy
parts. I have chosen this as a possible location for my project
because it's an ideal location of natural beauty where man has had
both small and large impacts on the landscape. The smaller being
paths carved through woodland, bridges across flowing rivers and
perhaps hints of forestry, while the larger impacts being the canal,
built to control the flow and direction of the water and allow travel
across it.
Below
are my contact sheets for this shoot.
The
day didn't start off great, the weather was overcast and it looked
like it was going to be another repeat of the Willingham Woods shoot
where everything looked boring and depressing.
The
time of year isn't great for shooting wooded area, or at least how I
wanted to depict it, so it depends more than ever on the lighting to
make things look as interesting as possible, to get away from the
dreary atmosphere given by the overcast sky.
The
days before the shoot the area had suffered from heavy rain, the
rivers had burst their banks and the shrubbery around the base of the
trees was looking muddy, flattened and not pleasing at all, which
didn't help with the whole depressing atmosphere of the lighting. A
lot of the area was flooded and so denied me access to a lot of
areas, meaning most of the photographs I took were taken from the
paths themselves, but I tried to get the best angles and most
interesting compositions available to me at the time.
Around
have way through the shoot there was a change in the weather and the
sun broke through the clouds. I took the most of this opportunity and
went back the the start of walk where there was a bridge I wanted to
photograph in the better lighting conditions. Although the results
weren’t great, I'm glad I went back, just to see how much the
location changed in appearance under the different lighting
conditions. The brighter highlights and stronger shadows completely
changed the scene for the better.
The
area around the canal was less affected by the flooding and so I
focused my attention around this area as there was more to photograph
and more places to go to get better angles on any subjects.
In
the end I think the shoot went well, it would have been good to have
more freedom around the area instead of having to stick to the path
and photograph what every one else was, so I could get something a
little different, but alas the flooding prevented this.
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| Jaimie Golby |
The above image is one of the bridge mentioned above. The image doesn't work for what I wanted to achieve because theres too much clutter, for my minimalistic style I need landscapes with plenty of empty space around them. I chose to show this image as a reminder and reference for the rest of my shoots of what I need to try and avoid. With the shoots in wooded area I find it hard to stick with a minimalistic approach, there is always to much happening in the image, too many distractions and it really takes away from the style that I'm going for with the project.
I made the image square to try and remove some of the distractions from the sides, but I think it compresses the images to much, I used this technique with future images as well, with the same effect. The subject becomes too centred and cluttered around it.
I used a bridge as my subject because they can be either a large or small impact on the environment, depending the size and style of the architecture. This one being quite small.
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| Jaimie Golby |
This
next image was taken in the more swampy and flooded area of the park. Again I had to make the image square because of the unattractive shrubs around the base of the image, they caused distractions and weren't nice to look at. The tree is looking quite dark in this image due to it being back lit and me being unable to get any closer or move around the tree for a better angle due to the flooding.
The idea behind this image was to have an 'island' tree with nothing much around it to show forestry works and the effect it has on a woodland. Britain is full of these island trees in fields showing the last tree where woodland once stood around it.
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| Jaimie Golby |
The above image is one of my better canal images. Again the image is too cluttered to follow the minimalistic style, but the strong leading lines from the base of the image definitely fit into this aesthetic so the image could possibly get away with being in a series depending on the other images. This image didn't suit being a square, and I think I will be trying to avoid making any further images a square format because it really takes away from the photographs. It reduces whats there too much and just makes the images too small, theres not enough empty space for the square to work. Also when putting images into a series I want all the images to be of the same format, and obviously some images suit square and some don't, but all should fit into the regular format of landscape/portrait.
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