Managing and updating the website is important to keep the site professional. last year I uploaded two projects on to the site and wanted to add my latest project “mementoes”. I also used these images for my portfolio and felt it was important that my website reflected my portfolio.
This project was shot on medium formate Kodak porta 160 with my Mamiya RB67. All the negatives were scanned at the university and I have processed them in photoshop. I had to create two separate file types one for printing and one for the web. My printing files were quite large and had a width of 16 inches and I used a white polaroid type framing. The website needs a much smaller file size so that it will upload relatively quickly, I used an image size with a width of 1250 pixels and made sure all my files were under 500 K. For the website I changed the boarder to black to fit the graphic style of the site, I prefer the white boarder and have used this in my portfolio.
Synopsis
The winter Garden
Memento – ‘an object that you keep to remember a person, place or event’.
At the end of my garden is an old barn where I have been hoarding “stuff” since my mother’s death in 2005. As I stared working on this project, I realised that really the objects in my barn represented my grief. My mother’s old lamp shade, her dinner plate, the lid to one of her saucepans. These items were part of a vivid memory of the two of us eating roast chicken on a Sunday.
Many of these things are covered with years of dust and cobwebs yet in some way I believed that my mother lived on in these everyday objects and the barn had become a tomb I had created to hide away from loneliness and heart break.
As I worked, I realised that these objects were meaningless. They were just things bought from shops. In our society where consumerism is almost our new religion, I had mistakenly attached emotions to objects with no value. My mother was not inside the dark barn, she was not the genie in the lamp. In fact, she was outside in the living landscapes of beautiful Suffolk.
These images are now what remain and they have become my “Winter Garden Photograph” Like Roland Barthes search for a photograph of his mother in Camera Lucida I have captured my fondest memory, Roast chicken with my Mother.
Choosing my portfolio presentation style
I am really pleased with my prints and when I thought about presenting the portfolio I wanted to have an environmentally responsible, tactile experience for my viewer. I choose a simple utilitarian portfolio box with an inner recyclable paper Sleeve to hold the prints. I also wrapped the prints in tissue paper to give it the feeling of a present and to show the care I had given to my prints. I had stored the prints in a large A2 plastic sleeve book But for presentation I wanted the viewer to handle the prints and have a tactile experience. I even took care tying the bow on the paper sleeve. I also enclosed a small print from my latest project about neurodiversity. On this print I wrote a handwritten note thanking the viewer for their time and added my contact details, a bit like a business card.
Within the portfolio I enclosed a small document with a synopsis of the project I am presenting, an About section and a brief summery of other projects I have worked on. The idea his to make my portfolio stand out and to interest the viewer. I used screen shots from my wedsite so as to keep a constant graphic stlye across all my platforms. website, instagram and the portfolio.there is a download of this document below and some reference screen shots in the gallery
EDIT for portfolio
here are some contact sheets of all the images I had to work from for my edit for this portfolio. I didn’t have good quality scans for all these images and only used the images with the high quality professional scan quality. Also I tried to tell one story in the edit and concentrated on the memory of having roast dinner with my mother. These are other back stories covered in the images like her feminist roots and other beautiful details of the barn. I didnt have a good quality scan of a exterior landscape/nature shot and would of liked to include one in my final edit.
Limitations – improvements
Over all I am very pleased with the portfolio but there are a few little mistakes which I would of liked to correct but was unable to due to problems with access to the printer and not being able to print with out Lawrence. when I was putting the portfolio together I noticed that one of the prints was a different size. I would also of liked to resize the only portrait formate print of the dress to make it same preparations as the landscapes formate prints, its a bit small. the other thing is colour balance. due to the limited time I had available with Lawrence I wasn’t able to do lots of test prints and really double check the colour palette across all my prints. These are not big issues But I don’t believe there is room for error in a professional portfolio. the client isn’t going to feel confident in your ability to deliver a professional final product if you can’t even get your own portfolio perfectly presented. I had to approach the project in a professional way in respect to access to printers, Lawrences time and cost of prints. I have pointed these errors out in this blog but believe that the work I have presented is just about to a high enough standard despite some of the compromises I had to make. in a professional world it is about both perfection, the reality and compromise.
ELIZA FUTURE 