Leading up to the weekend, I had all good intentions of cracking on with Assignment 2 of the course. Unfortunately I was asked to take part in an Open Day at work, which resulted in me being there for most of Saturday.

I headed out with the Mamiya camera late afternoon to explore an area about of 'edgeland' which starts about a mile from home. I had felt the area offered some quirky little spots which may be useful in my project but despite wandering around I saw little which inspired me. Now, I'm not so sure if it was the fact that there was nothing worth shooting there, or whether my unscheduled day at work had meant I was having difficulty in 'getting into the zone' of picture taking - I couldn't seem to settle my mind into seeing photographically. In addition, the camera was loaded with 100 ISO film, and the light dropped off significantly.  Light wag getting too low to hand-hold a large camera like the one I was using, plus I didn't have a tripod with me as I hadn't really panned on having a 'serious' photographic outing, more of a 'let's see what materialises' sort of walk. Maybe this was part of the problem, not having a 'let's get some shots in the can' mentality, no definite plan, no vision of what I wanted to achieve.

The weather was poor for most of Sunday, but as things started to clear a little I thought I would return to the area - took the Pentax camera this time as it is weather-sealed, and I wanted  to work on the 'Eliminating Depth Clues' project, and I have a couple of telephoto lenses for this camera which is required to get the desired effect. Again, I felt unsettled and uninspired, which showed in the images I came home with which were quite frankly shockingly bad; there is such a thing as the snapshot aesthetic, but these were just awful, nothing came together, and I do not know what I was thinking with some of the shots.

Learning points from the weekend:

Take the tripod along. It will slow down the process, set the hands free to have a little wander to explore angles, make fine adjustments, settle into the image-making process.

If it is an 'exploratory' outing, take a pocket camera (not an RZ67), snap a few angles to set the scene and generate ideas, then return with the 'proper' camera with a definite plan and a vision of the type of image I want to walk away with.

Otherwise, have a purpose behind shooting, rather than pointing the camera around, snapping and hoping something useful will result.