Back on the Road to Elgol (Week 10)

I have spent the last week in the Isle of Skye making progress with my Work in Progress Portfolio on the Road to Elgol. I was fortunate with the weather in that although I had a few days of sun, in general, I had sunshine and showers – providing the best opportunities for good lighting – and few “white sky days” and misty, wet rain. The objectives for my trip were to get the images, try out a new methodology for making images and recording my thoughts, feelings and decisions related to them, and develop my thinking in terms of the coverage of my first Work in Progress Portfolio and how I might develop my work and photographic practice in future modules. I had also planned to meet up with local artist, Julia Christie to discuss possible collaborative opportunities.

The images

I have not had much opportunity yet to process my images however I have made some initial choices and have a clear sense of the type of photographs I would like to include in my portfolio. I have also been able to share my images with some photographers – the feedback has been very helpful in terms of both the way I might process the images and also thinking about the overall effect of the portfolio and its integrity as a piece of work. Readers of this blog will recall I had a previous trip to Skye where I produced a few “shortlisted” images. These are below:

The following image I intend to convert to black and white to see whether it is a contender:

These are my images from the latest trip in early draft form:

I still have a number of images to review and need to consider the balance and breadth of them in the context of the portfolio as a whole.

New methodology for making images

I wanted to try a new methodology for recording my feelings, thoughts and decisions as follows:

Develop a new methodology for recording and understanding my emotional response to potential images in the field and the subsequent processing of them. To this end I will record my thoughts (via my mobile phone or transcription device) in terms of how I am experiencing the Road, the weather, my feelings, the scene (colours, impact, light, what attracts me), the message or narrative I am aiming for, and the camera (how it feels, settings, approach, composition). I will also record my thoughts as I process the image. In this I will seek to achieve epoche in the process of recording. Finally, I will generate a Word Cloud using nVivo which will pick out the predominant words during this process. I intend to display the narrative next to the image in whatever format I choose to present my portfolio.

I trialled the idea as planned by using my mobile phone to record my thoughts. Although I did achieve this and have a number of recordings to transcribe I found it hard to “slow down” sufficiently to really allow myself to think deeply about my image making. I believe this is to be expected at this stage and I can work on my concentration and the speed of my image making as I move through further modules.

Possible Collaborations

I was able to meet up with local Skye artist Julia Christie to discuss possible collaboration on this work and also a joint exhibition in July 2018. The intention would be for Julia and I to both consider the same scene and make choices about our focus depending upon our own personal preferences and artistic genre. We will then each produce our image/painting and our thoughts and feelings about it to be included next to the image in the exhibition. Although we have a venue for the exhibition in 2018 we are also researching the possibility of other venues on Skye to show our work.

With Julia’s permission a few of her stunning paintings below: