Having mostly been shooting on visits and trips outside of my everyday surroundings I decided to gather some photographic assets depicting such things. Given the highly personal nature of the project, it seems fitting to have assets that contain the fabric of my own day to day surroundings as these make up a large percentage of my environment, and my atmosphere, and will undoubtedly have an influence on my outlook. The decisions on what exactly to shoot were immediately apparent as being much harder to discern, in this case, the overfamiliarity of the subject led to an almost apathetic response to many compositions, the literal day to day nature of this environment creating a mask where nothing stands out, nothing presents itself as shot worthy. This was a unique challenge and one that required me to think more about what I was trying to evoke rather than what I was trying to present or depict. I also reminded myself to trust more in my own reflex as a photographer and capture on a more instinctual basis. This resulted in a mixture of images, some more clear cut and others being more abstracted, this worked for me however as more abstracted assets in this project are very useful as textural layers, that once blended, create very interesting visuals in the overall collaged compositions.
The shoots resulted in a mixture of pictures with half being from around my home and various details within and the other half being taken from the passenger seat of my Father’s car on a drive through the countryside surrounding my housing complex on an errand to purchase some aquatic plants for some garden projects. With the household shots, I felt more inclined to capture less distinct subjects and focus more on capturing scenes and qualities of my home, the paths of which I walk through multiple times a day. I also captured some more nondescript shots of walls, surfaces, and such to use their textures within the collaged compositions.
(Cropped, click for full view)
When capturing the shots from the car on the drive, I felt here there would be a more beneficial process of experimenting with shutter speeds to create effects that would elude to the passage of time and elude to feelings of rushing or fleeting existence. The results were mixed with some turning out rather well with tunnel effect motion blur on the outside of the vehicle, with sharper stationarity elements on the interior. These helped to create a sense of viewership and heighten the notion that one is very aware of the passing of time as it flows by them, especially when feeling isolated or detached from the greater machine of social society. Other shots in this group were focused more on capturing atmospheric scenes and of road signs and infrastructure as a more direct asset for use in the aspects of social misdirection and misinterpretation.
(Cropped, click for full view)
I will likely aim to capture more inward facing assets and continue to explore my own environments as sources for photographic work given the response I had to shooting here, the challenge presented by such familiarity necessitating a change of engagement and approach to my usual ones being an interesting exercise and one that I hope might produce some more variety in my work. I will also likely aim to capture some more work from my housing complex, somewhere whilst very immediate to me and my environment, being one that I’m not as familiar with as I could be, it being almost more akin to an outpost, being surrounded by forest, atop a hill, without public transport access meant that the estate was very much a strange place to grow up and now has a mixed feeling of welcome isolation from the hustle and noise of the surrounding areas of Croydon, Purley, and the M25.
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