In Another’s Shoes – Activity

The second activity of week 1 is titled in Another’s Shoes and the objective was to either understand one of the following photographic techniques: Rephotograph, Repeat Photography and Re-enacting.  Within my photographic practice I am particularly interested in the concept of time and how I can incorporate time in different ways into my photography either by making specific decisions when taking the photograph on how long the photo sensitive material or sensor is exposed to light or by combining multiple images to extend the time period covered by the final image where I have used post production techniques to merge multiple images which is a technique used for the City Canyons body of work (See post http://fineart.photography/project-city-canyons-final-edit/)

During Week 1 I spent time at the Essex Records Office gathering research data for the walks I plan to undertake along the Essex Coastline. The harbour that is closest to my home is Maldon and the quay used to be the be the home port for a number of the smacks that used to fish the coastal waters. After some research on google to determine the approximate location of one of the photographs in the book I decided to rephotograph the site in as close to possible the same conditions as the original including tide. The only thing I could not control was the weather conditions given the time period available for the activity.

Using the original photograph as my reference and the fact that key landmarks such as the church still exist made it relatively easy for me to get my camera and tripod in the correct position which happened to be on the mud flats. That made me think about the logistics of using a large format camera with a tripod on the mudflats when the original photograph was created.

I decided to place the original image at the edge of the frame and similarly hold the image in the same right corner so that at first viewing the reader might think that the two images were combined digitally however the observant reader with the presence of my thumb to verify that the image was created by recording the original image and the scene in a single image.