The assignment brief: The great distinction between amateur and professional photography is not competence or special skill or technical quality (although these do play a part and professional photographers certainly work hard to achieve excellence in these areas). Professional photography is performed to order, for acontracted purpose, and to deliver results that a client has asked for. A well-defined assignment actually benefits the photographer because it directs the creative effort.

Basically, we had to decide on a notional client, obviously the subject matter being about people and/ or the places they inhabit. Then we had to decide on the kind of client, and the type and purpose of the assignment. Then we had to imagine what the basic brief would be from the client, which means thinking from the other side of the fence = what someone commissioning a photographer might want.

As with Assignment Four, because I have applied for APEL, I will not be officially submitting this assignment, but I might be using images from it, for my APEL application. My client for these images was someone who is interested in the lives of children in the townships in Cape town, South Africa. I based all the images around the activity and way of living of the children. My final images would have come from those I show here.

The brief is that we are on assignment for an intelligent, thoughtful travel publication (not tourist promotion). We had to choose approximately 12 images of a town, village, city, etc and we had to aim to show the character of the place and the people who live there, with as much visual variety as possible.

As I am in the process of applying for APEL, I will not be submitting this assignment to my tutor, but because I had already planned and taken the pictures, I might be using some of them as part of my APEL application. These are my final possible images. They were all taken in the Khayelitsha Township in Cape town, South Africa.

I'm not going to write much in detail about why I took each image, and how the shoot went, etc. I would prefer the images to speak for themselves. The one element I would like to mention, is that the townships in South Africa, is not a very safe place to be, for various reasons. I took a great risk in being there, and even though I did have permission from various authorities to take these images, there was still the possibility that things could go wrong for me. In some ways, that added to the experience as a whole, for me. In other ways, it made me aware of the fact that I truly had only one chance to capture something. After that, I would never have the opportunity again. 

This exercise is about how to approach a space, while focusing on how it was intended to be used. We had to choose an interior space, either domestic or public, and look at it from the point of view of its function, who uses is, what it  was intended to be used for,  and how many different aspects there are to that activity. What we would in fact be doing, is analyzing the purpose of the space.

The place I chose, is King's Cross station in London. It's one of the busiest railway stations in the world and I have always been fascinated by the way people seem to move through it with such " purpose". It's not a place you stay at. People are always on the move and everything happens fast and quickly and "on the go".

The purpose of the space is obviously to be house trains, and to be the arrival point and departure point for many journeys each day. The station was designed in a very specific way to make it as effectively and proficient as possible, and I feel that they have been very successful in their effort.

After  the very basic analysis of the space, we had to make a carefully considered picture of it, and try to put across the way it works, or the people who use it.

I like the sense of busyness and movements in this picture as I feel that encompasses the energy of the space well. The train to the side, waiting to upload passengers and transport them, and then the travelers walking to wherever they intend to go - another train, or to work, or home, or to the under ground.

In addition to that, I really like the light in this image.

I went to a Gerhard Richter exhibition a couple of weeks ago at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Here is a video.

Honestly? I was not moved. I'm sure he does great portraits in his own right. But I didn't feel much emotion when looking at his work.

Firstly, there were 48 photographic versions of original paintings done by him in 1972, supposedly all cultural figures of the 19th and 20th century. And within the 48 pictures, there wasn't one woman. Which in the 19 and 20th century was probably more acceptable than it would be now. But still, it was his choice to do this, and I can't help but wonder why.

The only part of the exhibition that touched me was his personal portraits. I liked that he has quite a few of people facing away - I can relate to that, as I said before, that is definitely part of my style.

He often painted from photographs. And that's something else that sits a little uncomfortably with me. I understand that photography can be a ways to a means, but to me, it is the "means". I know that many artists use photography as a mere tool towards achieving their medium. But this is my medium.

One interesting aspect to mention - he has a painting done in 1994 called "Reader" which is of a woman reading a letter. He based it on a painting by Vermeer "Woman reading a letter." I found that interesting, as I have recently spent quite a bit of time studying Vermeer.

Other than that, I am glad I went to the exhibition. Art is not always inspiring and pleasant. It made me realise again that I do have very specific tastes and styles and opinions on what appeals to me.

We had to use an image we had already taken for another exercise, where the visual prominence of a figure within a setting was not very good. The object of the exercise is to use the digital processing methods that we have available to us, to make two new version of the image. In the first image we had to make the figure less prominent, so that it recedes into the setting. In the second, we had to do the opposite by making it stand out more.

I have several digital processing tools that I use. My favourites are Photoshop Elements, and Lightroom. I used Lightroom for this exercise, and increased or decreased exposure, brightness, vibrancy and post crop settings to produce the following two images.