Project 36

Project 36 was a small task in which we were given 2 hours to take 36 photographs of anything and produce a contact sheet.

Initially my mind was blank, I had no idea what to photography. I thought about keeping it simple but then it was almost too open to think of anything. I didn't want it to be boring for me to photograph. I wanted to have some sort of reason behind why I was taking these photos. I wanted them to link in some way.

After 15 minutes I was concious I was thinking too much about what I wanted to photograph when I should have just started.

A sign caught my eye as I was walking around and I noticed that I could not focus on the lettering. It was slightly blurred. For a while I have wondered if my perscription has changed and maybe needed my eye sight checked as some recent photographs I had taken on manual focus, were out of focus, when at the time I thought they were in focus.

This prompted me to take photographs out of focus, or more to the point as close as I could get to what I naturally see.

Once arrived at the location I took out one of my contact lenses. Instantly my view on everything changed. I have extrememly bad eyesight and can only really see something if it is no more than 30cm away from my eyes. To have one eye very blurred and the other one clear was a little weird. I thought about how to describe it. I remember when I was younger at school friends would always ask to wear your glasses or say "What's it like when you don't have your glasses on" and I suppose thats what I was trying to show.

Using my clear eye I looked through the camera and tried as close as I could to match it with what my vision was from my natural eye sight. This clearly was just resulting is blur after blur of pictures. The effect for me seemed to change if I got closer or further away from what I was focusing on.

While I was taking these photographs I had quite mixed feelings about them. I was thinking about what the other students might think to seeing these, would they understand or was it more of a personal thing. Would others just see out of focus photos and not think much of them? I believe they make more sense when my reasoning is put behind them, thats for sure.

After the car had broken down on the way back I was sat on the side of the road thinking that I was quite glad that there was little chance I would be showing my contact sheet. Sat there I felt that it was rediculous, but at the same time I felt, it really does not matter, its not important. There just seemed to be some feeling of not wanting to show work that I did not feel confident about.

When I got to a computer and started looking at the photos I was still thinking they are boring photographs. While I was making the contact sheet, I disliked them even more, they were all different sizes so in order to make me feel a little better about them I had to group them together the portrait styles together

and then the landscapes just so the contact sheet looked cleaner. Still didn't do a great deal to liking them.

Today, 24 hours later my feelings have begun to change a little towards the photographs. I looked at the contact sheet in the morning and felt a little better about them. I then looked at the photographs individually on full screen for the first time. Some of the photographs I still did not like at all but a few started to interest me. There are about 6 out of the 36 that I'm happy with.