Progressing with Digital Photography Assignment 2: 2013

Overall Comments

You have provided a very comprehensive set of documents that make it easy to understand your working and thinking for this assignment.

Assignment potential (after Assignments 2 and 4)

I understand your aim is to go for the Photography Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to succeed at assessment. In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my reports.

I have been distracted over the past 3-4 months with family concerns in that my husband has been seriously ill and needed my support and a close family member has recently died. I am now able to focus my attention on my degree work and will do my utmost to get back on track.

Feedback on assignment

My initial reaction to this assignment is that there is an over reliance on the effects and that you do not have a background in graphic design! This does not mean that the idea was not a good one nor that the result does not have an element of success, just that there are things that could be done to make a much more successful final result. I will deal with the graphic design elements later and look at the images first.

Whilst I do not have graphic design qualifications I have been using design software for many years in the production of posters, newsletters, periodicals and feel you are being unduly harsh in your comments.

The great advantage of using the sort of effects that you have chosen is that they do add uniformity to the images and cover up inconsistencies that might have been totally unacceptable between the background and figure on the front cover. However, the back cover is much nearer to ‘natural’ than the front and that is uncomfortable. I have done a very quick and rough version of the back that moves more towards the look of the front in my mind, to give you some idea of what I mean.

My cover designs above

Revised front cover with figure removed. I couldn't decide whether I wanted the figure included or not so I left it in. It was to symbolise a shepherd keeping watch over his sheep, but as I had to use my own pictures I found something that would 'fit the bill'. On reflection I accept that perhaps the cover was better without a figure; it looked better without it.

Tutor suggested redesign

I agree that I could have taken the back cover further to portray a more Hockney–like appearance.

The typeface that you have chosen for the titles is rather casual to convey the idea of a Classic I think. Typographers tell us, with good reason, that the visual characteristics of the type conveys a great deal of the meaning we receive tro m the text and the whole effect of your cover is contemporary and light rather than historic and serious. I am reminded of a series of short programmes on commercial television some decades ago called ‘Out of Town’, a friendly look at the countryside and country pursuits aimed at the urban viewer; not really what Hardy was dealing with in this book.

Okay, I accept that the typeface could be more classical but you do not give me any ideas as to what constitutes classical fonts.

From the view of a purely technical exercise you have certainly gone into it with enthusiasm and put a great deal of effort into it but I don’t think it has come off visually. The inclusion of a contemporary figure is dubious, though I can see what you were trying to do I think, but the rather cartoonish effect of the filter you have used takes the edge of the work, though it does all fit together in some ways and if it were a contemporary book of gentle anecdotes about gentile country life today it might well work.

The figure on the front cover was to represent a person. As I was pushed for time by then I used what I could find in my own image library as my understanding was that I used my own work for this assignment and I had nothing really suitable.

The back cover image seems to me to fit better to the book than the front (though it is a long time since I read it and I am thinking of Hardy in general!)

However, you may well feel that whatever the outcome in terms of the actual book cover, you have learned a lot about image manipulation from the work you have put in and this is valuable, perhaps more so than the success or failure of the actual exercise in absolute terms

Learning Logs/Critical essays

Your blog is a bit sparse at the moment. I know that it is a gloomy time of the year and that there is a lot to get in the way of study but it would be really good to see that you are doing something to try to break through! Are you taking photographs apart from the work for the course? What books, of any sort, are you reading? Have you seen any photography/other art recently that inspires or infuriates you? Just at the moment one might get the impression that you aren’t really engaging with the module or with photography in general and you need to address this.

As I explained previously I have had personal problems to contend with but now expect to be able to devote all the time I need to continue successfully in this work.

There are some excellent exhibitions at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) that is local to me and I will be writing them up shortly. I have noted your reading suggestions below and will endeavour to obtain the relevant books.

Assignment Brief

Create a design for a book jacket (which wraps around and include front cover, spine and back cover) for a work of fiction, using your own photography. The main photograph should be one that you’ve shot specifically for this project. Approach this assignment as one facing a professional photographer, to be completed to the same professional standards that you see in book publishing. The assignment focuses on fiction rather than non-fiction, so that you have the opportunity to conceptualise rather than choose a literal image.

Conceptualising the cover

Paperback books come in a wide range of designs, colours and sizes so the choice of size seemed entirely based on number of words and print size. Having looked at many copies of my chosen book title the choice seemed to be mine; did I want it to be pocket sized or a larger edition?

I measured several paperbacks and their sizes ranged from:

· 4.5” x 7’ x 1”

· 5” x 7.75” x 0.75”

· 5” x 8.5” x 1.25”

I had a paperback book which measures 6” x 9” x 0.75” which seems a reasonable size so I decided to base my cover on that. The overall dimensions would be 12.75” wide x 9” high, see illustration on the right.

Layout:

There were several different layouts which I could consider, see below for suggestions and here are my main choices to begin with:

Design number 1:

This cover, my first basic design has blocks of colour and only one picture on the front cover showing sheep feeding against a background of Dorset hills. The fonts are mainly serif and old English rather than the sans serif modern fonts that would be used on more recent novels.

Design number 2:

Design number 3:

I came upon a design for a book cover which, rather than having just one picture on the cover had a grid with 9 smaller pictures illustrating various main features of the book.

I drew this rough design whilst travelling on a train to Exeter and thought through the implications of using this design. You can see that the small pictures feature the main characters included in the story, that of Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba Everdene, Mr Boldwood and Sergeant Troy. Rather than use formal portraits of each person I had thought to use a significant feature from each person. For Sergeant Troy I thought it might be more meaningful to have a picture of his sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his red uniform, whilst William Boldwood would probably wear a Beaver hat. Gabriel, being a shepherd at the start of the novel could have a picture of a shepherd’s smock (or part of) and that of Bathsheba, famous for her luscious black curly hair, portrayed by her hair underneath a hat fashionable at that time.

I also gave some thought to the other five parts of the grid and thought to feature items that would be relevant to a farmer’s life in the late 1800s. Thinking through the most likely items – hay stooks, a shepherd’s hut, sheep and sheep dog – I realised that these pictures were more suited to summer and autumn and that I would have a great deal of difficulty finding the right images at this time, i.e., in the middle of the worst winter weather since records began, November/December 2012/January 2013.

Being faced with such difficulties and the time constraints, I decided to revert to my original idea of a field of sheep in a valley in the style of David Hockney.

Planning and executing the photography

Once I had decided on the design of the full cover I needed to think about the content of the picture. Would one image be sufficient for the front or would it be better to have a panorama.

I had been travelling round the district, in the most foul of weathers, to take views of the local hills, ploughed fields and sheep, see map below.

As you can see from the map above, I spent several sessions travelling around the district sourcing various pictures. I went east (22^nd November) along the coast road to take pictures of wet ploughed fields in howling gales, then to Charmouth, Chideock and Eype (25^th November) for more fields with and without sheep. Then finally I went west along the A35 to Kilmington (2^nd December) for panoramic pictures of sheep, hills and ploughed fields.

During this time I had to take into consideration that November 2012 was the wettest November on record with storm fronts coming in from the Atlantic one after another. Whilst this meant that I had to plan my time carefully, it left ploughed fields awash with water that gave brilliant reflections along the furrows. In my final back cover I used two images combined as one had good strong furrows and the other had a more interesting horizon and stunted trees. I had to take into consideration the telegraph poles and lines but these were fairly easy to remove using Photoshop.

I found I was obsessing with views of sheep every time I went out so, to save me going mad I called a halt after I had been to Kilmington as the pictures I took there seemed to cover the brief more than adequately.

Date	Place – Dorset/Devon	Images of:
11 November	Broadwindsor	Hills, sheep
22 November	Coast road to Honiton	Ploughed water-logged fields, skeleton trees, cloudy skies
27 November	Combpyne	Sheep, hills, trees
28 November	Chideock	Ploughed and ridged fields
	Higher Eype	Hills and sheep in the distance
2 December	Kilmington	Sheep, hills, trees, ploughed fields, track

Preparing the image

One of the last groups of pictures that I took on December 2^nd, after a particularly heavy frost as opposed to heavy wind and rain, turned out to be the best set of images. I was able take a wide panorama from one side of the A35 to the other in an almost 270^orange and this proved to give me most of what I felt I needed for the front cover.

In fact I used the first 90^o of this picture and a composition of two ploughed fields images for the back cover. I have saved all the images for this panorama in the folder called Kilmington Photomerge, stored in the folder called Assignment 2 A Photographic Book Cover.

I originally used pictures through Photoshop Photomerge to create one image but decided to cut it down to half that number and exclude the right hand side showing a ploughed field as I had changed my mind about using one complete image across the whole book cover. Here’s the merged image:

As you can see from the Layers Palette on the right hand side of the screenshot, I merged 9 different pictures to obtain this panorama. My original thoughts for the book cover were to have one image running from the right hand side of the front cover, across the spine and on to the left hand side of the back cover. I wanted the sheep to be part of the front cover so flipped the whole image horizontally in Photoshop so it was on the right hand side and the ploughed field was on the left.

In the end my final design was made up of two separate images but the front cover came from this photomontage. The back cover came from two pictures that I took on the coast road to Honiton on November 22^nd.

Front Cover

In the end I decided to treat each side of the book cover separately and have different pictures on the front and the back but all in the David Hockney style. With this in mind I set about creating a front cover showing the Kilmington pictures but only of the sheep in the field. I used 5 of the images to merge, see below.

I had to decide what part of the image I wanted to feature on the front cover but had to flatten the whole image to be able to crop it. Unfortunately my shadow had been included as the sun was so low in the sky but as I wanted to crop the gate out to bring the sheep closer I wasn’t worried about it being there. I also wanted part of the trees on the left hand side to be included to frame the sheep and house in the background so had to choose carefully where to crop. The clouds had also morphed into an unusual shape which I wanted to include as well.

My final crop was as you see below:

I wanted the sheep to be more visible in the picture as they were blending too much into the background but thought I would enhance them later in the postproduction work. When I had made my final crop the image looked like this:

I thought the sheep were rather indistinct in the image so selected them and made them lighter to stand out more. Then I used the Filter Gallery to change the photographic image into an image which looked more like an artist’s picture. I used the Artistic Poster Edges at 8 levels to give the streaky blocky look which was the effect I wanted.

I came in a bit closed to make the sheep bigger and stand out more and cropped in closer.

I thought the whole image needed something else so bearing in mind that all photography was to be created by me; I searched my library for any previous image that might be suitable to portray one of the main characters in the story. The only picture in anyway suitable was that of a man that I took as part of the People & Place module in assignment 5 on characters of Lyme Regis. This man was a home winemaker but always wore a hat which could resemble something that could be worn by a shepherd/farmer in the 1850s. I found an example of a shepherd wearing a smock using Google Images on website http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.green233/ymm/smock.htm but, as I had to have taken all the images myself, I looked round my library for something that might fit the bill.

This one below gave me a side view of someone wearing a suitable hat but not the smock I wanted. I was able to select his outline minus the outstretched arm and hand and even though he was wearing a bright shirt, jumper and modern glasses, I was able to get enough of an outline to carry on. I extracted the image and removed his glasses, desaturated the colours to black and white and added sepia to obtain an older looking image. Then I used the filter gallery on the Sumi setting to get the bands of colour. When I moved this image on to the previously prepared image I felt it wasn’t quite right so I deleted it and rethought how I could make it look more suitable for the picture and setting.

In the end I used the Levels to make the whole image darker and this gave the blocks of colour darker outlines which were more in keeping with the black outlines in the sheep picture.

Then I merged the two images together to complete the image.

I think this picture shows the most important aspects of the storey that of a shepherd/farmer and his sheep with the farmhouse in the background.

Once I had all the components assembled I was able to put them together to form the completed front cover.

Back Cover

I wanted to create a wild and wind blown view of a ploughed field with skeleton trees showing against the horizon for the back cover.

I went out on the worst November day possible when it was raining in sheets and the wind was blowing a gale. Every time I stopped at a different field opening and got out the car, I was lucky not to get blown over. The ground in the field openings was absolutely sopping wet and the mud was dangerously slippy. All this for the sake of art! I took several pictures of waterlogged ploughed fields and what I liked most was how the water lay in the furrows. I thought I could incorporate this into the whole image using the filter gallery.

In the end I used two different pictures because the first one had the best tree silhouettes and the other the best water filled furrows. I also had to remove the telegraph poles and wires that stretched across the horizon but this was fairly easy in Photoshop.

Here are the two images before I combined them.

With two images combined I used the filter gallery again to create blocks of colour. Here you can see how the sky changed from grey clouds to be broken up in various blocks of grey colours. The ploughed field had yet to be subjected to the filter gallery so I added an effect and got the following effect:

I used the Lorium Ipsum text provided through the OCA PwDP website and scanned in a bar code from one of the Madding Crowd books I had obtained, inserted that, found the website address and added that to the bottom of the page. Once I had all the components assembled I was able to put them together to complete book back cover.

Spine

The spine was fairly simple to put together as I only had to use the title, author’s name and company logo which I had already created. These items just needed to be resized to fit the space available. The spine’s measurements were 9 inches x 3/4 inches. I copied the same fonts for the title and author’s name and scanned in the company logo from another book of the same name. I thought it important to keep the same fonts and colours as had been used on both the front and back covers.

Incorporating type

I’ve always been interested in fonts and type and read the advice given for this assignment on

Progressing with Digital Photography (at http://oca-student.com/node/85430) with interest. The relevant articles were on working with text in Photoshop, 12 Tips for Photoshop Text, I love Typography and On Choosing Type.

There are so many different fonts available to the publishing industry today it can be very difficult to decide on which ones were suitable for what items. One of the main considerations was how readable the type was to those who would see it and buy it in a rack of many books. Whilst the cover design should be relevant to the subject of the book, the fonts used should be clear even from a distance. As I said earlier there are many fonts available but it seemed best to keep to a popular one for ease of reading.

I did some research into old English fonts but felt that there was a major problem with easy readability. Old fonts seemed to be rather complicated and manage to hide the main message.

Then again I had to make the decision as to whether to use fonts that were Serif or those that were Sans Serif. This meant that the fonts had curly bits on the ends of the letters (serif) S or those that didn’t (sans serif) S. The main serif fonts available on PC were Times New Roman and Georgia and sans serif fonts are Arial, Comic Sans and Calibre. A person who uses the Apple Mac system will be able to choose from a slightly different set of fonts, serif which included Georgia, Apple Chancery and Perpetua. The sans serif fonts for a Mac included Helvetica, Verdana and Futura.

Fonts:

My final design would be half titles and half picture(s). I used the following fonts for each title, which I kept constant for each part of the cover design:

Heading ‘Wordsworth Classics’ – serif font Brush Script Std, 20 pt., colour Gold.

Main title ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ – font Brush Script Std, 56 pt, with blending options of Drop Shadow, Outer Glow, Bevel and Emboss and a Colour Overlay of grey. I decided to colour the main title gold as it seemed to make it stand out from the overall black background much better.

Below you can see the finished cover with extra font information

Author’s name: ‘Thomas Hardy’ – serif font Georgia, Regular, size 36 pt, colour white.

Book Blurb: Lorium Ipsum – serif font Verdana, Bold, size 16 pt, Gold colour.

I wanted to keep the fonts similar so that the back cover was as recognisable as the front when it was on show on a bookshelf.

Conclusion:

This has been an interesting assignment both photographically and design wise. I have had the opportunity to put together several ideas. The hardest part, and one that I don’t feel I have been totally successful due to time restraints, was getting the images together. Not only was I unable to get some of the images themselves but the weather has been totally against me when I wanted to photograph outside.

Nevertheless I have enjoyed the challenge of creating a new book cover for such an old, well-loved book. Living in Hardy country, i.e., Dorset, set another sub-conscious challenge as Hardy is so well loved in this area that do to anything outlandish seemed almost sacrilegious. Although not wanting to be influenced by other students’ work I had researched on the OCA PwDP forum others work and found one example that made me think that I was not extreme enough.

I realise that I have always been a jobbing photographer wanting to give the client what they wanted rather than shocking them and Yiannitsa Cegarra’s work ( found at this website http://yiannitsacegarrapwdp.wordpress.com/category/assignment-2/) really made me wonder if I was on the right track. I can’t understand all the implications of her cover but I still feel that I like mine better. If the object of the exercise was to make a book cover that attracted people to pick it up and want to buy then I feel mine fits the brief more.

Progressing with Digital Photography Assignment 2

Jen Hollands' Home Page

Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Classic Fonts

Assignment 2 A book cover

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Just checking before posting off

Finally completed, only 2 months behind

Monday, 7 January 2013

New year, new assignment to complete!

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