My Visual Diary: Week 2, Day 2

This afternoon we had two different lectures, one was a small group discussion about the music photographer we researched and the other was on contact sheets.

Discussion:

We were split into two groups and one group went to do the discussion first and the other group went to do the contact sheets first. I was in the group to do the discussion first which meant that we were all in a small group of about 4 and we all discussed what we discovered about the different music photographers. At first we all found out that we hadn't found that much out about the artists to what we were told yesterday but once we got talking we decided to go on our phones and research into them a bit more.

3 of the people in my group researched and spoke about Jim Marshall and I researched and spoke about Tom Oldham. After I researched on my phone in the session I found out more about Tom. What I found out about Tom was the he was Richard Branson's personal photographer for Virgin's events, he's V festival's official brand photographer for MTV's EMA's, he's a member of the House of St Barnabas, he's the official photographer for Riders for Health which means he gets the opportunity to travel quite often. Tom's style is mainly portraits of musicians, sports stars, and different people who ask for his services.

Tom also:

- works in colour

- works in greyscale

- uses lighting

- shows defined features on faces

- uses low angles to take pictures to get an intense glare

- uses a wide angle camera

The 3 other peoplein my group then took in turns to speak about Jim Marshall and they came up with this information:

- he works very naturally with make up artists involved when needed

- he had no chldren but he said his photos that he produced were his children

- he had a quote explaining how he worked 'When I'm photographing people, I don't like to give any direction. There are no hair people fussing around, no makeup artist. I'm like a reporter, only with a camera; I react to my subject in their environment, and its going well, I get so immersed in it that I become one with the camera.'

This is one of Tom Oldham's music portraits of Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine

This is one of Jim Marshall's music photos of Jimi Hendrix backstage at one of his concerts

Contact sheets:

After we had finished the discussion activity we had a quick break and went up to do the contact sheets acitvity. Personally, I had never heard or created a contact sheet before as I hadn't studied photography as a GCSE as it was not available at my school. I learnt a lot in the session as I had never learnt about contact sheets before so all the information given to me was completely new. To create a contact sheet you need to use Adobe Bridge. First of all you have to open Adobe Bridge and insert your SD card or whatever hardrive you are getting your pictures off and go to Edit - select all. This will select all of your images to add to a contact sheet (there may be more than one contact sheet depending on how many pictures you have to be added to the contact sheets) You then go along to Tools - Cache - Cache and Export. This will then make your contact sheet you can then print the contact sheet(s) out. Once they have been printed out you can start to label and mark little details on the sheets that you want to change on Photoshop. Once I printed out my contact sheet I started to label mine with what I wanted to change on my images.

This is how I labelled my images with what I wanted to change on Photoshop. I had never used a contact sheet before so highlighting what I wanted to change was quite different for me. The hand was an easy thing to point out to change but smaller detailed things were difficult to find as I had never done a contact sheet before.

This is what my contact sheet ended up looking like once I had found some faults in my images that I wanted to change. I didn't find all the little details that I wanted to change because we didn't have time in the lecture but I went home and looked at my pictures on my computer screen to find smaller changes I wanted to make as I felt that on the contact sheet the images at the bottom hadn't printed out very well.