Second lot of Photographs - Contact Sheet

These are the best of my second photo shoot, they were taken in my bedroom, because in the extracts it mentions a bed so i adapted it around that. 

New Ideas For Book Cover.

The extracts that i have from the book confused me at first, they sound like different books. I then broke them down into sentences and words to see if I could find anything that would give me an idea for the cover. These are some parts of the extracts I picked out, that i could work on.

- bread

- my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression

- a good book

- sat in his hut

- nature

- writing table

- snuff box

- tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of crust

- prongs of his fork

- chewing

- i work in my bedroom

- propped by pillows in his bed in the white light of a incandescent petrol lamp

- pimples in his forehead

- pencil moved slowly across the ruled paper

- heavy smoker

- red swan hotel

- leap have i leaped from hill to hill

- hag

- leap

- skylight of the hostel

- a tall ivy-branch

- trees and the stags

- leafy-oak, clumpy-leaved

- the nut-smell of hazels

- faun, little long legs

- life looks black as the hour of night

- a pint of plain

- horse has also ran

- health is bad, ace is pale

- food is scarce, hunger grows

- you still can turn to a brighter life

I have had another idea for this book cover as my last ones were not that great. It is based on the author FlannO'Brien who seems to drink and sleep a lot. My idea came from the extracts: 'i work in my bedroom' and 'propped by pillows in his bed in the white light of a incandescent petrol lamp'. My idea is to take some photos in a bedroom with the bed in the bottom right corner so that there is a plain wall where the text can go, so it is easily seen. On the bed I will place a book and a pen on the pillow and some bottle of alcohol maybe in the bed with the covers slightly hiding it like it is kept there or I might place it propped up against the pillow so it is more visible. Also I thought I could have someone lying in the bed asleep clutching the bottle and the book slipping away. I will try both of these ideas and take lots of photos from different angles to see the which looks the best. For my lighting I will use the big light and also take the same shots with just a lamp to see the atmosphere, as well i could place the lamp in different places to see what looked visually the best.

First Photographs

These are a few photographs that I first took with a film camera to get an idea of what would work as a book cover. The two duck photos would probably work best as they have blocks of colour and the text would be more readable. The other photos are too busy for a book cover and the text wouldn't stand out as well.

I have placed the book cover template over my original photographs to see what works.

 
        

Out of these six covers i could use, I think number 3 makes the title standout the best, but i really like number 1. A problem i have come across is that the grey text is much harder to see on the photographs than the white text, so with my final cover i will have to make sure i pick a background that you can see both well on.

Research - Other Penguin Classics covers

Penguin Classics have a matt texture and a lot of the covers are monochrome or quite toned down colours so that the text stands out and you can read it easily.

These are an example of the new covers for Penguin Classics.

Ideas.

 

These are a few sketches of some ideas I have come up with for the book cover

1. I would create this photo by ripping out pages from a book and scattering them around under

a lamp post, when it is dark and then take it rom a distance to get the whole lamp post in.

2. This photo would be a hill with some trees and bushes without leaves on the top with a lot of sky.

3. This is two ducks on a canal with a grassy bank behind them.

4. For this photo i would open a book, switch of the lights and use a lamp to illuminate the pages and i would like it to be black in the background.

Research - Previous Winners.

These are from last years competition, which I have looked at to give me ideas on how to present my photographs to fit with the text, because that is one of the main things we have to think about when composing the photo.

Brief

This assignment is for the Fujifilm Student Awards, we are to design a

 new cover for the book 'At Swim-Two-Birds' by Flann O'Brien. It must be taken on film and must fit the new Modern Classics jacket layout. 

Tree - it would...

For this image we got into groups of four and looked up at the sky and imagined something falling, we then wrote that down. On another piece of paper we wrote down three consequences of that object hitting the ground. Then we passed one piece of paper to the left and one to the right.

My papers said:

Tree

It would bounce, it would hit me, it would fly away.

I picked 'it would fly away' I first went out and found some trees, this one was in M&S. Then Sian drew some wings for me so i cut them out and took a picture of them, and on photoshop I put the two images together on a black page and added the text I got.

Chair

For this assignment we had to find a chair and then take it with us around burton and ask people to sit on our chair so we could take a photograph. This was to help us build our confidence with asking people if we can take their picture.

Park

For this assignment we had to take a series of photographs that when put together made a movie, like stop motion. We then edited it all on imovie.

Evaluation.

In this assignment I was inspired by Richard Billingham's photographs of family because I liked his shots of everyday activities and I also like that they are not looking at the camera, acting like it is not there. This is what i tried to achieve with my images, taking them when they are not looking, so they are natural poses. If I could improve this project i would take more photographs of my family doing different things at other times of the day.

Final Image.

Experiments.

I have picked some of the best of my family photographs and changed the levels, contrast, brightness and saturation, I have also cropped a couple of them.

I will pick my favourite photograph and also ask other people which they think is the better one, this will then be my final image.

More Family Photographs.

This is my second attempt of taking family photos, I have used the flash to hopefully make the outcome better and a shorter exposure for less blurriness.