Visual Journal.

The files are all ready to go to print and I’m bringing them in tomorrow morning. 

I met with Ann and Anthony to have a look at my exhibition layout and my latest book maquette. They were very happy with my progress over the past few weeks and I think I’m almost ready to go to print with my work. This is very exciting as there’s been a huge amount of work that’s gone into this body of work and it’ll be great to start seeing the final prints and books. Over the weekend I’ll substitute the shop scans from the book maquettes with my Hasselblad scans and resize the images for print in the Copper House Gallery. Unfortunately, I’m in work for the next two days so I can’t do it this week, but there’s still plenty of time. Then early next week I’ll bring the files to the respective printers. It’s crazy to think but a few weeks ago it seemed like this week would never come. It’s been stressful but I think I’ve dealt with the stress efficiently and my confidence in my project has helped with this.  

The past week I’ve been doing lots of small tasks which needed to be done. These include scanning the rest of the photographs and fixing them up. Finalising the layout of my book by printing a few maquettes. Writing a few examples of text to use in the book and showing it to various people to scrutinise. Although I’ve no experience in writing in this style, I think I’ve become quite good at it throughout the past few weeks. I know why I’m writing certain things and what information to give the reader to convey certain emotions. This is something I haven’t been able to master with my photography, yet. I also found out that I’ve been accepted on the Television & Cross-Media Culture Master’s degree course at the University of Amsterdam. The course starts in September and I’m very excited. Five years ago I didn’t think I’d do anything with my life and this time next year I’ll be finishing up a Master’s degree!

Paul Graham's a shimmer of possibility has been useful in designing my book. But whereas with his book the images move around from page to page quite a lot, I’ve decided to keep the images quite static as my books are much shorter than his. 

At the moment I’m designing the book. This entry outlines my ideas for the books as I go along the design process. I want to have three books (previously four books which were too expensive). The books will be A5 size, bound and come with a black slipcase. This will all cost about €250, which is extremely expensive for what it is, but I guess these things will always be expensive. Due to the cost, I’m only going to get one, whereas I wanted to buy one for my girlfriend. Each book will be extremely short, consisting of only 8 pages. For this reason, the binding will have to be very tight and there won’t be any room for text on the spine. Due to this, I’ve included a Roman numeral on the front of each book in the bottom right corner. Much like the designing of the layout, entries to this workbook won’t be suitable for the masses of changes which go into the layout of the book over the duration of its design. 

Researching W.G. Sebald’s writing style I came across the final fiction workshop which he gave at the University of East Anglia during the autumn of 2001, not long before he died. The writing tips he gave during this workshop really helped me out in my writing. Here is a link to the website I found this information on. “Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality”. I feel that one of the strengths of my work is that I make places look ‘weird’ or to use the words of the above tip, that there’s a ghostlike presence in my images.  

The lecturers were happy with my layout and I’m happy to go ahead and finish scanning my negatives which I’m going to have printed in the Copper House Gallery. I’ve been slowly scanning the images I’m going to use over the past two weeks and fixing them up when I’ve got time. Still, there’s been a few surprise entries to the exhibition and book that I haven’t scanned, so I’ll have to spend a day scanning these images and another day fixing them up for print. 

After many hours of tinkering with the images on the wall, I’ve come up with a layout which I’m happy with. I think that the top layout will need to be changed slightly (I took one image away before I took this photograph, which has since been returned) as it’s a little too formal compared to the other walls. I’m very pleased with the other two walls though and I think they’re very well thought out and interesting.  

In preparation for writing the textual narrative in my series of books, I started reading Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. Admittedly I hadn’t read a book since I started reading Harry Potter in the year 2000. Well, that’s a little bit of a lie because I read and thoroughly enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, which I read in about 2009. But other than that I hadn’t read a book for almost twenty years. Reading Rings of Saturn was interesting as it doesn’t follow a coherent narrative, much like Vonnegut’s book in which the plot jumps from place to place, sometimes within the same paragraph. I’ve really enjoyed the book so far and his deep interest in history is endearing and is something I’m going to attempt to introduce to the text in the book. This will be difficult as he has space which a novel offers, whereas I have just a few pages.   

The process of arranging work on the wall is a laborious process which takes time and in truth, can’t really be discussed here. There are so many quick decisions made throughout the day that I’d need hours to discuss them here. I think that after a few more session of re-arranging the wall I’ll have a layout that I’m happy with.  

I started putting up cheap prints on the wall in a small unused room in the college. The studio I was going to use was occupied so I decided to use the small room, which is only 20cm smaller than the room in the Gallery of Photography. The layout I proposed to the lecturers looked a little ‘off’ when on the wall so I quickly started making changes. For this reason, I don’t have many images of the first few layout changes I did today. When Ann saw the work on the wall she gave me some helpful advice as to what was working and not working. She commented on the use of images with heavy shadow was working well on one of the walls and the images on that wall were much different in terms of place. Although I don’t like the word ‘fantasy’, it was quite apparent that the places in these images convey an idea of a ‘fantasy-land’.    

At the moment I’m producing my exhibition proposal document for submission in a few days. I want my project to be exhibited in the room of the Gallery of Photography on the second floor, furthest from the stairs. I think that room is a good size to show what I want to show. The problem I’m having is how to arrange the work on the wall. I want a layout that’s asymmetrical but rather strangely, this is harder to produce than a symmetrical layout. I’m using Steel Works by Julian Germain as a guide for the layout, which is helping although I feel his layouts are a little too symmetrical. The Wolfgang Tillman’s exhibition at IMMA is helping in this regard. After the portfolio review, I decided to not frame the prints and they’re going to ‘vulnerable’. Trish said that framed and unframed prints in a small exhibition tend to look a little awkward and there’s absolutely no way I can afford the two grand to frame all of my prints and the storage costs after the exhibition.        

On Monday I printed the images for my portfolio review. The prints look amazing on PhotoRag paper and I’ve decided to use that paper for the exhibition. My portfolio review went well and I got some good feedback from Trish Lambe from the Gallery of Photography. She was genuinely complimentary of the work I showed her and this improved my confidence to no end.  

After trying for quite a while and failing to remove the colour casts using the Channels Mixer in Photoshop I looked for alternative methods online. The first result on Google was by a website called Petapixel. The process was so simple that I didn’t think it would work, but it does. Another step I use which isn’t discussed in the article is to use the eyedropper tool to find a middle-grey or white in the image and adjust the levels accordingly. There are a few little problems with the process when it comes to images which are overly bright or dark, but for images which are well exposed the process gets accurate results. Additionally, I’ve noticed that night-time photographs with orange street lights are difficult to colour balance using this technique. I’m glad I found this technique as it cuts out the guesswork of colour balancing solely by eye using the Channel Mixer, something I was struggling with earlier today.