OUGD603 - Guidebook - Film Photography Process

Based on visual research into Martin Parr's photography, particularly his 'Return To Manchester series of photographs, one idea was to use film photography throughout the book, since it was thought that through this process, this would give the images a slightly grainy, dated colour effect, more representational of the time in which the town was developed. It was thought that this would also bring in ideas related to industry that the town is associated with in terms of its links to the Arts and Crafts movement through the process of using older technology and processes more fitting with developments of the time.

The process of film photography is a fairly temperamental and experimental process, therefore it was not guaranteed that any of my film pictures would develop properly or be of any good use within the publication. However, most of these pictures came out well and achieved the dated look which I had hoped for.

However, due to not being able to zoom in and out as much as current digital cameras and so being limited in my compositional space for these photographs, this meant that some images were more cut off at places than I had hoped for. Also, due to natural light, some photographs were darker than I had hoped for and therefore reducing the legibility and quality of some images.

In addition, I was limited in the number of shots I could take in one go, therefore meaning I could not gather every single image I would need for the entire publication. For this reason and the others above, it was decided to continue to utilise digital images I had taken previously. It was thought that these were also better quality, something which people like within publications, especially if these are to be used in something like a guidebook. However, some of the better film pictures were still considered to be utilised within the publication for those places of interest that I hadn't taken pictures of previously on digital. This therefore means that the dated effect is still utilised in some way within the publication and so there would be a subtle underlying tone of the original message behind this process.