FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby. Below are some snapshots from my phone and some brief notes on my day at the festival. It is a festival made up of little exhibitions dotted around the city and rather hard to find without a map. There were talks and portfolio reviews but as it is coming towards the end of the festival, I have missed them. It is thanks to a bulletin email from Foto8 magazine that I found out about the festival just in time to visit. My starting point was at the QUAD centre, one of the bigger venues. Here I was able to pick up a better map and all the information about each exhibition location.

the QUAD and an outdoor exhibition in the market place.

Behbak Hashemi - Nezhad, Orderly Conduct (@Déda)

Mehraneh Atashi, Tehran's Self Portraits (@ Derby Museum and Art Gallery)

Anthony Carr, A month of nights, Derby (@Pickford's House)

Anthony Carr, A month of nights, Derby (@Pickford's House)

Anthony Carr, A month of nights, Derby (@Pickford's House)

Caption underneath reads "this camera is currently photographing the gallery space"

So there is just a quick update on the mini adventure I had today. I'm not going to make excuses about why I haven't posted since January. I simply haven't. The space camera-less project didn't go so well however I will still put the work up soon. I have now started two more projects as part of my degree and also have some images from a trip to my hometown Lyon, France and hopefully some snaps from a recent study trip to London.

more photograms. these are experiments for my current project on creating patterns in space. I am still trying to work out which materials create the most interesting patterns.

My tutor suggested that i find a glass paper weight and see what light it lets through. i doesn't let much through, although, it does diffract light creating a less controlled effect.

Another jelly mold. this time i made a very neat swirl pattern with food colouring in jelly and in the dark room is spun it on the photographic paper. this is one of the slower spun ones.

As well as trying different materials i am also trying different papers. this photogram is done on positive photographic paper. the texture underneath is textured paper.

the photography gallery. for our second exhibition we asked for collections of work. as it is only our second exhitition we are still learning how to promote the gallery. our plan was that all of the members on the gallery curator team should bring some work to display incase we didn't get enough from other students. people were very last minute in bringing there work and becasue of this a few of us on the team got to put our work up. so here are some little mobile phone shots of my work up on the wall.

if anyone is reading this blog and is in or visiting falmouth. pop into the photography gallery.

it's one the second floor of the photography centre at tremough campus.

space. first experemental prints for my current project looking at patterns in space and nature. these are photograms of jelly molds in petri dishes with food colouring and oil added in different mixtures to make different affects.

jelly mold with food colouring. this one was put in the freezer,

therefor creating little islands of ice on top on the jelly creating a texture.

oil, just oil. as it was filling the petri dish i caught it before it filled the base.

i tryed holding the dish higher. it looks i'm holding a marble!

this is food colouring in oil.
the colour was green and didn't let much light though so the contrast isn't great.

*for this first time i have tryed to put my name print on my images so that no one can steel them. i don't like doing it becasue it gets in the way of the image but if it saves them then i'll do it.

"it's best to assume that some will see the creative sector as a luxury rather than a necessity right now, so you may have to soldier on and work hard to prove your worth to employers.

the art of getting noticed.
Unpaid work experience really help, wether it be a year- long placement or a few days work-shadowing"


from Target jobs get. Directory

been a long time. This is the work I was due to put up a couple of months ago, sorry readers. These are my final pieces from my nature project. They were produced using a mixture of double exposures and burying negatives. (sorry for the space between them, they were printed with white borders.)

nature. for my most recent project i looked at photographing landscapes,turned into photographing my garden! i wanted to create images that the viewer really had to look into, see under the layers, colours, textures etc. these are some of my development shots. i will post my final six perhaps tomorrow.

the sky.

shot on holga with fuji 120 colour film

was shot to be used as a base for a mixed media composition.

left negative.

shot same as image above.

i left a selection of negatives out in my garden for a week letting nature affect them. the biggest affect was the rain as it changed the colour of most of the negatives and left water marks on some. my photographs of nature were added to by nature it self.

double exposure.

shot same as images above.

shooting a second image on top of one just taken without winding the film on. i was also using my macro lens in front of the holga lens. i found it hard to focus the closer image as on the holga what i see though the viewfinder is not the same as what the lens sees.

there is a lot of work from this project that i want to put up here. (yes i know i should have done it as i went along but never had the time to sit and upload it all). while uploading these images i have realised that about half of this nature project is mixed media and hand printed so a lot of my experimentation is in my sketchbook that i have just handed in for the deadline. i will scan it in and add it to the blog when i hopefully get it back next week.