Artists statement

To be completely honest with you I don’t think my photo taking was very technical, it was very emotionally driven. The photos I have chosen are there because they hopefully portray a certain emotional connection between people. I wanted my photos to portray the people I love, my family and friends, in gatherings and good times that we share everyday. Most are un-posed and the subjects are usually not overly aware of the camera being there.

This brings me to one technical aspect of the photographs. I have taken most with an aperture of f/2.8 with my camera set to aperture priority, so that the remainder of the settings are automatically adjusted. This means that some of the photographs are blurred or out of focus, my justification for this comes back to a quote I read by Nan Goldin-

“I take blurred pictures, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what. Sometimes I use very low shutter speed and they come out blurred…”

The most important reason for me doing this was that I didn’t want to use a flash in my photos, I feel that it can be very intrusive and means that the people being photographed are always conscious of the camera. I also wanted to capture the lighting in certain settings, not make it seem as though the area was well lit and bright when in fact it wasn’t at all.

I had a very productive session in class with Stu the other day. We looked at basically all of my photos i have taken over an extended period of time and narrowed them down to about 70 odd pics.

Of these i have now chosen about 34 that i think i want to make the final cut. I'm not sure if this has to be narrowed down further. I no that Stuart only wants us to use the best photos we have so I am trying really hard not to waste space but i just can't seem to narrow my choices down any further. I think i am perhaps too emotionally attached to my photos so it might be worth having a friend or family member look over them and see what they think should be included. Perhaps if i do this with a few people i will be able to find a common theme and just include pics that several people think are worthy.

I think that my "theme" has also been refined. I'm not so much going to look at smiles, as i mentioned in my last blog, but just look at friends, family, relationships and really build a story with some powerful photos.


I want each photo to show one or more of these themes that i mentioned above. So i think i will look closer at each photo i have chosen and see that they capture these things. This could be a good way to eliminate some.

Next time i write i would like to give some thought to my artists statement.

But thats all for now.

blurred/out of focus?

I think i'm finding a common theme in the photos i like! SMILES! i think especially because they are of friends and loved ones capturing the moment of them smiling and laughing really is special.


Lots of my photos are out of focus, which is really annoying but made me think about a interview i read about Nan Goldin, the interviewer asked if she does this on purpose

"Some of your pictures are blurred. You did it on purpose?
Actually, I take blurred pictures, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what. Sometimes I use very low shutter speed and they come out blurred, but it was never an intention like David Armstrong started to do what we call, he and I, "Fuzzy-wuzzy landscapes." He looked at the back of my pictures and studied them. He started to take pictures like them without people in them."

My favorite technique is to use a low aperture, instead of a flash. This sometimes means images come out blurred, however some of the blurred photos have captured something really special to me. So I am wondering if i will be able to keep these in?

getting there

So in my last blog i talked about how i wanted to draw inspiration from Nan Goldin and was going to take photos out camping with my friends. I really don't want them to look like any old photos that someone would put up on facebook, at moment they still very amateur and hopefully a long way from the final photos that i will present.















I like this photo because it shows the emotions as they are happening. I like that Jayden has been captured mid sentence and lisa is laughing. Its natural and just shows friends having fun.










I really wanted to capture how special it feels to have the chance to camp around the fire with good friends. I hoped that having a shot with the boys playing their guitars added to the ambiance.









Showing solitude. Tristan in his own world with his music.

finding inspriation

I’m pretty excited because I’ve finally found a photographer I can get my teeth into. When Stuart mentioned Nan Goldin today and talked about her taking photos mainly of friends I knew that there was something in it for me. I’ve had a look at her work and it is different to what I thought it might be at first.

Her work appeals to me because it’s raw in the sense that the people aren’t glamorous or posed. They have been caught in the moment and some images are really confronting.

I would like to draw inspiration from her for my final folio by the way of photographing friends and family in a un posed fashion. Maybe getting out of bed, or cranky making their breakfast.

I’m going to a friend’s gig this Friday night so I’m going to take lots of pics there. I’m also going camping on Saturday night so thinking that could be a good opportunity to just snap away at my good friends and see what I come up with.

This blog is pretty all over the place- Sorry. But that’s pretty much where my head is at, at the moment.

My montage

This is me and my montage on the steps at VU.

Last weeks blog entry- I've had it saved as a draft by accident

Wow, talk about confronting. The work of Joel-Peter Witkin certainly intrigues me; I could look at it for hours. In and odd way I would like to be able to draw inspiration from it, but I’m not too sure how. I don’t think I could get myself in the right frame of mind to capture the “morbid” (I use that only in lack of a more adequate word) nature of his work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I like to crop things so heavily in my photos. I also have noticed that I’m more drawn to photographs of objects that are cropped. It’s true that to an extent every photo crops something. Everyday we see images as they are, we see them whole and complete. Taking a crop photo, focusing on only a small aspect or fragment of the piece is seeing it from a different perspective. Choosing to highlight something else, something that you might not notice everyday.

week 1 photos

Here we have my "wide angle" shot.














Ugly. One thing I can't stand is people who think it's OK to litter.



















Tasty. This is quite literally a roll I thought looked very tasty at the time.














Surface. The rough surface beneath my feet.














Semi. Again a rather literal interpretation. Like a semi-circle (half a circle)




















Self portrait. Kind of out of focus and clearly heavily cropped, this is actually quite fitting for my mood at the time.



















Portrait of a stranger. I kind of cheated, I found this girl sitting next to a guy from a this very class, so it didn't feel as threatening to ask to take the photo, but she was a stranger.













Mixed lighting. I'm still not to sure what this meant. So its a mixture of light and shade (behind and in front of the tree)













Extreme closeup. I wanted this to be closeup enough to be able to notice all the detail in the tree trunk but not so close it distorted what the object was.















Drab. It really was a drab looking day with the clouds overhead threatening rain.



















Blurry. A very similar image to the "extreme closeup" except this time i was focusing on the blurry background.














Last but not least, something beautiful. I found this one very challenging to find within the confines of the uni grounds. But thought that this green and fresh looking foliage made the cut.

Week 2

I’m going to start by saying that I feel very overwhelmed by this class. I think it is the mixture of there being so many foreign components. I have never used flikr before, never created a blog and feel very out of my depth in regards to the photography side of things. Never the less, I am always keen to give things a go, so here goes nothing.

So this is my first entry, I’m not really too sure what to write. So far I have just been trying to get a handle of both this blog and flikr, I’ve uploaded some photos to flikr from my trip away over summer. i think you can find them there, my user name is Sarah Andelk.

I’ve never really used anything but a very average digital camera before but really enjoyed being able to have more control over the way the photographs came out in our session in last weeks class. I’m really looking forward to developing a greater understanding of the camera, therefore having more control over how the images come up.

So far I’ve looked at many flikr groups and many professional photographers, my head is swimming with them really. However I have found 2 that Stuart has suggested and have taken a liking to “plastic palace alice’s photostream” and “Lauren.rabbit’s photostream”. I am very drawn to the dreamy quality of Plastic palace alice’s work. The colours are captivating, with lots of warm, rich hues. By contrast, Lauren Rabbit’s work is very moody, in black and white but the detail and clarity of photos really caught my attention.