West Glamorgan Archives

This week we visited the West Glamorgan Archives in order to help us find alternative sources for our research.

Visiting an archive doesn’t sound like a very exhilarating experience, however, I enjoyed it very much. The gentleman giving the tour was very charismatic and extremely knowledgeable with regards to the information they store.

Whilst not dwelling too much on how precisely the materials are stored, we were given an informative demonstration of a few of the oldest documents stored at West Glamorgan Archives.

Before we left we were also shown a variety of old photographs depicting important Swansea landmarks in ways that were unrecognizable.

I particularly liked the segment of our tour which concentrated on the Swansea slums, located near the present day ‘VUE’ cinema

Shooting Robert King

In the second session of the semester, we watched the documentary ‘Shooting Robert King’ by Richard Parry.

The documentary follows photographer Robert King over the timespan of 15 years in his search for an image worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.

This film shows a stark contrast to the previous one (War Photographer), as it exposes us to a far less mature subject in Robert King. This immaturity is portrayed by the lack of his knowledge of the subject he is shooting.

Nevertheless, King ends up having many of his (surprisingly good) images published in big name tabloids such as ‘The Guardian’ amongst others and becomes an established personality as a war photographer.

One thing I noted was that as opposed to James Nachtwey, whom, after a day of documenting these violent conflicts, would have a glass of water, King took a more common approach: Women and Alcohol. He seems to embrace a very hectic lifestyle in order to cope with the madness he experiences as part of his profession.

Even towards the end of the documentary, Robert King seems out of place and discontented. When asked how he feels when he is shooting (photographically) dead bodies, he describes his emotions as depersonalized from the subjects, claiming he is simply looking at pieces of meat, trying to establish decent photographic compositions around them.

Richard Burton Archives

Today we visited another of Swansea’s archives, the Richard Burton Archives, located at the Swansea University main campus.

These archives seem a bit more sophisticated in their means of storage, however, I did not take as much inspiration from the tour itself as I had liked. Perhaps due to the fact that I felt too much time was spent discussing the effort behind storing the documents and not enough discussing the actual documents stored.

 

War Photographer

For our first session of the second semester, we watched a documentary produced by Swiss director Christian Frei. The film follows photojournalist James Nachtwey as he makes his way through war-torn Kosovo, covers the struggles of poverty-stricken Indonesians in Jakarta and documents violent protests in Palestine.

The documentary discusses many of the controversial aspects of being a photojournalist, e.g. photographing the deceased in the presence of their loved ones but also the blatant dangers these photographers expose themselves on a daily basis. Nachtwey, however, justifies his position in these conflicts by describing his role as a messenger for those who otherwise would not learn of the evil in the world.

It is quite an upsetting film, but it sends a good message for would be photojournalists looking to make a name for themselves and it urges them to be mindful of the importance of a strong moral compass whilst photographing people when they are at their most vulnerable.

Creative Bubble

After my fellow students, Kaylee Francis and Hamza Sbeitan both had successful exhibitions at the Creative Bubble, I decided to exhibit the images of my India trip here as I have received overwhelmingly positive feedback for them. Though there is no collective theme for the images, it is a collection of Street-Photography style photos covering Jaipur, Varanasi, Pushkar, Jodhpur, and Udaipur.

Unfortunately after trying to book the Creative Bubble for a week in October, I have been told that the next available slots won’t be until after Christmas & NYE. Fortunately, this will give me a bit more time to plan the event.

CRA-shoot

During my shoot at the Chris Rees Academy I came across a number of problems. The main one being the colour grading of my images. Because where I was shooting was a very bright location, with a white background, mainly white subjects and terrible luminescent bulbs shining down from the ceiling. A certain style I was looking for was that of the Instagram page ‘Art of Jiu Jitsu’. Art of Jiu Jitsu is a gym in California which is quite strict on its uniformity. Again the setup is fairly similar, with the walls and floor being white overall, yet they emphasize the importance of uniformity, which allows a pristine white look over all the images.

I had a hard time getting the very fine white out of my images, which often ended up looking more yellow, grey or even blue. I tried to fine-tune these mistakes in Photoshop, but in the end, I eventually opted to change my images to black and white. The reasoning for this was not only my struggle with the white balance but also that the black and white seemed to maintain uniformity within the images.

You can find the Art of Jiu Jitsu Instagram page here:

Art of Jiu Jitsu

Here is a contact sheet which I hope displays the difference in white balance that I had mentioned:

 

The Chris Rees Academy

I have decided to focus my project for Individual Practices on the Chris Rees Academy in Fforrestfach as I was spending most of my time there in order to follow Scott Pederson. The Chris Rees Academy is the largest Brazilian Jiu Jitsu  Academy in Wales and home to Wales’s second fighter to be signed by the UFC, Brett Johns.

I myself have been training at the academy for the past three years, so it was easy for me to gain access to specific areas.

The main focus I maintained during my project was to document the practitioners of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (or BJJ for short) during their lessons. This covered the kids lessons that start at ages 4-6 as well as 6-10, the beginner’s classes, intermediate Gi classes (the Gi being the traditional kimono worn in BJJ, similar to Judo or Karate) and the advanced NoGi classes (as the name states, these classes are performed without the gi, no longer allowing the practitioners to take collar/sleeve grips etc.

The Chris Rees Academy is named after head coach Chris Rees, who started the gym in 2004 and was the first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Blackbelt in Wales.

Individual Practice Topics

After having our individual tutorials I have narrowed my potential topics down to two options: Brexit, though I am still not sure how I would demonstrate this pictorially, or one of my teammates, Scott Pederson.

Scott Pederson is a 21 year old amateur Mixed Martial Artist whom I have become a big fan of over the years. I have the pleasure of training at the same gym as Scott, so this would grant me a lot of good access. I know Scott fairly well and I also know a lot of his friends with whom he spends his time outside of the gym, so this would grant me some insight into his personal life. I think this would be a great topic, as I was informed that this would be a project that would stretch over the next three years of our course and I would love to see how not only my work progresses, but also how Scott progresses in his personal endeavour to become the best Mixed Martial Artist he can.

I have had the pleasure of watching Scott fight under different regulations, including Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, K1, Muay Thai and MMA, with myself being the main photographer for his most recent fight for the Adrenaline Fight Night Lightweight Championship belt.

For the time being I will follow Scott during his training, however I do think that this could become a broader topic than just focusing on Scott, seen as MMA is one of the fastest growing sports in the world and there is a lot of controversy surrounding it as a professional sport.

Final Cut – Photo Essay

Cover

Establishing Shot

Double Page Spread

Single Pages

Smaller Images

 

Contact Sheets – Adrenaline Fight Night

Adrenaline Fight Night, 24th February 2018

After meeting with my contact at MMA-Wales and explaining my position (myself being a student with the objective of creating a photo-essay for one of my modules), I was given a wrist-band that would allow me to come and go throughout all sections of the host-building. This allowed me a great amount of personal freedom when it came to taking my pictures.

For the first section of the event I spent my time scouting the building, getting to know the different sections, e.g.: warm up areas for the red corner/blue corner, welcome area, seating area and of course the octagon where the fights would take place. My main goal here was to visualise the best angle for the best possible shots. Later on I realised that I had focused too much on the angles and too little on the importance of the relevant lighting.

As you can see in the first set of images, my first images were taken in daylight. As soon as the sun had set and the ‘event lighting’ was switched on, I began to experiment with an on camera flash gun.

Unfortunately the images I was producing were not what I had hoped they would be, so I asked a group of photographers what settings they would recommend for this sort of environment. They advised me to bump up the ISO on my camera, seen as there was a lot of available light in the octagon and its surroundings.

Another issue I discovered throughout the night was that I would be moving from the area where the fights were being held (almost entirely dark apart from the strong beams of light illuminating the ‘cage’ and commentators), back into the warm-up areas where the athletes were preparing for their bouts (very bright, white fluorescent lighting from the ceiling). I have to admit that I was not entirely focused and often forgot to change the settings when jumping from one area to another, jeopardising the quality of my images in the process.

A few more issues that occurred during my shoot were the cage itself during the bouts and the shutter speed I was using to capture the action. The cage itself was wreaking havoc with the auto focus on my camera (Canon 5d mk3, 24-105mm lens), not knowing what to focus on, leaving me with a few images with a lovely sharp image of the cage and a blurry background displaying a pixellated silhouette of the fighters. I tried to resort to manual focus, but this again failed due to the fast paced nature of what I was trying to capture. Overall this left me with many blurry/pixellated images and a lot of frustration.