Exercise: Revisit your first assignment

The first exercise in Unit 3 is to look back at the feedback from the first assignment and consider what changes we might make in light of it. My feedback mentioned a potential missed opportunity for recording a different culture, and this made me think of more ways to shoot. Since I did this project, I have started to go jogging more in the park, and people of all backgrounds use this park for walking, jogging etc. I had started to think about maybe using these people, as I now feel a little more confident in approaching them to shoot portraits. It feels like this may also address the apparent lack of a 'sense of place.' I have also got to know a few people in the street and thought about shooting family portraits outside houses.
I sat down to think about all of this and was quite excited about a potential reshoot and thought about doing these over the weekends and taking my time to do them. I would also re-process the original shots in monochrome as suggested, to remove the tungsten cast and see what they looked like, although the reshoot during daylight was my preferred option.
At this current moment, however, I am unable to return to my neighbourhood for the foreseeable future and so am unsure what to do next. I will re-process the photos as this is possible where I am, and will keep revising my plans for a reshoot.
I got evacuated from Tawau last week as the FCO deemed the area unsafe. I moved from my house a few days before for security reasons as it was felt I was safer staying in town with my work colleagues. This happened just as I was re-reading the comments from my tutor about assignment 1 and submitting assignment 2, and thinking about the re-shoot.
This whole process is something I am still coming to terms with, and the longer we are away, the more unlikely it seems that we will go back, and even if we do, I am not sure how safe it will feel due to the events just before we left and the potential risks. I have heard that there are lots of police and army now, and navy ships out in the bay so it all feels a little surreal how much it changed since we left just 8 days ago and the area got deemed safe for 'essential travel only.' This was a place I enjoyed driving round and felt secure in most of the time, but it seems all had changed.
I will try and figure out a new plan and keep updating my blog as I go, I am starting to slowly work through Part 3 now. 

Assignment 2: A Photographic Book Cover

For this assignment, we had to:
" Create a design for a book jacket (which wraps around and includes front cover, spine and back cover) for a work of fiction, using your own photography . The main photograph should be one that you've shot specifically for this project. Approach this assignment as one facing a professional photographer, to be completed to the same professional standards that you see in book publishing. The assignment focuses on fiction rather than non-fiction, so that you have the opportunity to conceptualise rather than choose a literal image."

First we had to choose one of the books they listed. At first, none looked too inspiring. I chose Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury first, but then decided that all the images I could think of were too literal and I wanted to find something more challenging. I settled on The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I also needed a book that I could do a shoot for in Borneo and this one seemed to be one that fit this criteria. Also, it was one of the books I had access to.

As I read the book, I came up with ideas involving butlers, cutlery layouts, buildings from the colonial period (as this is possible in Borneo), old cars and relics from the post war period. I did an initial shoot at the tea gardens in Sandakan, of cream teas, considered the staff (who dress like old-fashioned butlers and maids), the cutlery as it was laid out, and some old relics like an iron and telephone they have there. I also took a few of the building as this was representative of the period. I looked at other versions of the cover, and eliminated a few ideas such as the cutlery idea as they have already been done, as has taking a photo of a butler or car, they are too literal also.

I settled on 2 ideas for the photograph for the cover. I wanted initially to use an image and cut it out and place it on a background, but decided to also shoot images where the typography could be placed over the image. I went back and experimented with these ideas, and settled on a few shots to try out. I also decided that I wanted to turn the image into a black and white or sepia image, as I feel this represents the time period more accurately. I experimented with a few effects in lightroom, using the black and white presets. The one I used in the cover was a toned preset called 'antique.'

The images I shot were of the tea house and grounds with sky in them, and then of relics I found there and a cream tea as this also represents the period, something a butler may serve his master. One issue I had is that I shot the photos of the building in landscape automatically, even though I was aware that I may need to use it in protrait orientation, but decided that it gave me more to crop and more choice of which part of the image to use when I resized it. Another problem I had was that my initial idea involved using a whole image and wrap it around, but I was unable to lighten it enough to take the text for the back cover, and so I chose then to use the image on the front cover only. I also tried one cover where the image was placed without the text over it.

I looked up the Faber and Faber image on google images, and needed both the black and white ones for different formats.

I created the ISBN by putting on of the edition's ISBN's into google and searching through images.

This was the image after processing in lightroom 4 using the black and white toned antique preset.

The original image.



For deciding the cover size, I looked up the formats that the book has already been published in, at this link http://www.iblist.com/book2276.htm . The one I decided to use as my basis was published by Faber and Faber in 2005, dimensions 5 x 7.6 x 0.9inches. This meant my template had to be 10.9 inches, and the middle 0.9 inches would be the spine, so I put guides in accordingly using photoshop elements 8. For my initial design, I used a black background and white text, and for the others I used a black background and white text on the back cover and spine, but black text on the cover over the image. One version was totally made up of the image and black text, but this did not show up well on the back cover and my attempts to lighten the image did not work in the way I hoped and so I decided not to choose this image.

Using type was the next challenge. As I explained above, some involved white text on a black background. My first attempt used Imprint MT shadow for the title and headings, and Times New Roman for the rest of the text. In the other versions, I also used Helevetica and Cambria as a variation. I was initially very happy with my initial attempt but then realised I had not included any text over the photo or integrated the photo as I would like and so I tried a few more variations.

This was my first attempt, which used Imprint MT Shadow text for the cover and spine (cover size 54/author 30 other text 14). The spine has text size 28 and 20 for the title and author respectively. On the back cover, I used Imprint MT Shadow size 30 for the title, then went for a sans-serif font Times New Roman bold at size 13 for the main text.

 I wanted to then try a version where the photo spanned the whole cover. First though I had to reverse the image as the building was on the wrong side for my plans, this was very simply done in photoshop elements 8. For this version, I used Arial for the cover (size 48 title and 30 author, spine 20/18), then Arial for the title on the back cover (22) then Times New Roman bold for the text size 10.

This was one version where I had cropped the landscape photo to give me a portrait view. This one uses Helevetica bold for the title (40, author 18) and the text has been placed in the blank spaces on the photograph. The spine uses Helevetica bold 24 then 18. The back cover is Helevetica reg 30 then the text is Cambria bold 13 for the book information then 11 for the blurb.

The final version uses Helevetica bold 44 for the title and size 24 for the author. The information about the Booker prize is size 14 in Helevetica bold oblique to emphasize the information. The spine is Helevetica size 22 and 12, then the back cover title  is Helevetica reg size 30, and the text is Times New Roman size 13.

On the whole, I am happy with the finished result as I feel it represents the time period and is not an obvious reference to the nature of the book, by including a butler as I cold have. The one change I would make is considering the shadow effects, the 2 shoots occurred on very different days weather wise and this was actually the easiest shadow to work with. I may also have taken images with a little more sky to give a little more flexibitlity as this could easily be cropped out. I found it challenging and fun at the same time, especially when I discovered that some of my ideas such as a table full of cutlery had been done in some form already after a more extensive google search. I have been exposed to the challenges book designers face when choosing a theme and it has already made me look more closely at fiction books after I read them to see if I can figure out why the decision was made for a certain image.