Assignment 3: thoughts

Assignment 3 is all about monochrome.

My problem is that I think in colour, I see in colour and all my creative ideas seem to be in colour! What to do?

The house project is a good one. It will turn into a substantial piece of work (my first) and is expansive, easy to explain and an interesting typographical study of the area where I live. I don't want to 'waste' it by converting a selection to mono and using them for this assignment, because i'm worried then the larger, colour project won't be as strong. So that idea is out.

Next  I thought about a personal project focusing on my elder son, who is almost 3 - a kind of a 'day in the life'. This would work except that he is so colourful and interested in bright colourful things (I have some great photos of him eating raspberries, playing with lego etc, not good ideas for a mono project), so that is out too.

I also had the idea of the 'selection of infinite views', but I'm not happy with how this is progressing (I will post some images on my blog soon) and I don't feel like the project is clearly defined and I'm not sure of the direction I want to go with it.

I have also thought about a portrait project, mainly of my husband. As we get older I can see we are changing and want to capture this. But I'm not a people photographer and I think this will result in quite a forced project that won't really be 'me'...

Then I thought about a documentary project of people working at the farm across the road from where we live. This idea has potential. I shot some images last week, though have not managed to get them onto my computer due to some technical issues with my card reader. I have probably got four or five good images from my first outing, and the advantage of this project is that it is close by and easy to access, though slightly challenging with a baby in tow... Thinking about my tutors suggestions of project definition:

Succinct: A documentary style portrait of the farm; volunteers and staff working.
Expansive: Well as long as I live here I can capture the different aspects of 'work at the farm'.
Managable: Good location and easy access for the public.
Readily contextualized: Well I should research similar projects and get some ideas of what to capture.

Documentary has a history of being captured in monochrome, which means that this idea is well suited to mono. This enables the subject matter to come across strongly and not be swamped with colours. I can concentrate on form and structure in my images instead of worrying about colour. Though I can use the colours carefully if I want to enhance part of my image and then tweak this in post-processing afterwards. I will continue to think carefully about this project and start some research and see how it goes. In the meantime I will have to think of other potential ideas in case this one doesn't work!