Reflecting and presenting

So today is the day for my presentation!

What have I done?
I have created a presentation entitled 'Mary St'. It is a photographic portrait of a street in my neighbourhood. This is the first time, other than a holiday photographic projects, that I have worked through a project from the conceptual struggle to the stress of presentation.

This is something I have wanted to do for a really long time and I have had great fun as well as plenty of challenges in thinking and working this through. It is definitely a work in progress...there is plenty of room for improvement and I'm hopping that I am brave enough to hear to comments of others today...it is both hard to ask for and open your head and heart to receive feedback.

I also find myself thinking about future 'street' projects...so I think this is the beginning, not the end.

Why have I done it?
I settled on this project because it seemed to give me an opportunity to work in a structured way on some of the things that have capured my imagination over time. I began with thinking about the graffiti on the walls in my area but soon realised that graffiti only has significance for me when it is situated, with a relationship to it's location and so I spread my wings to focus on the whole street.

I have always been interested in the detail of a particular place urging myself to wonder about the essence that makes one place similar to of different from another. I usually think about plants, buildings etc and only recently have I explored the place of people in my photographs. And so this project gave me a chance to:

• portray Mary St (trying to learn from Atget in Paris or Cazneaux in Sydney or Abbott in New York)
• explore the architecture (inspired by Sean Scully
• think about how people use the street
• to photograph shops and shoppers
• to look for the expected and the unexpected.

How did I get there?

Along the way I have:

• begun to make friends with my camera
• begun to make friends with my new Mac
• expanded my capacity to use Bridge, Photoshop and Aperture for the management of photographic projects
• taken care to document as much of the process as I could both in my blog and and my notebook
• with so many new things to learn to part that I have not done successfully was being a generous contributor to the flickr interactions...I regret this but time and priorities have been my enemies
• I have been to exhibitions and looked at photography books with new eyes
• I have pushed myself to discover and use as many of the functions as possible, especially in Aperture

What now?

I need to spend a lot of time developing my eye for technique.

I need to spend a lot of time further exploring and understanding the capacity of Aperture and Photoshop in getting photos to look their best.

I need to think more about the basic principles of what makes fine art fine art...questions about line and form, structure and emotion etc

Could I ever have an exhibition...I'd better read that book I bought, insired by Sue D, about being a contemporary artisit...tha's what I'd like to be. I think I've begun.