DPP: Assignment One: Workflow: Tutor Report & Reflection

Financial Centre Station (corrected)

The tutor’s report is in and contains a good bit of useful advice.

Overall a solid first assignment with no major issues and some promising visual approaches to creativity.

At first I thought there wouldn't be much in the way of specific guidance, but the tutor didn't let me down.  To view the original assignment, follow the [link].

On prints:  He suggests that because they were ordered online and sent directly to the tutor they are of less value as learning tools.  He makes a good point, but assuming the prints will be returned (as they were in my previous course) I’ll have a chance to evaluate them after the fact.  For work that is being submitted ONLY as prints, presubmission inspection would be absolutely necessary.  I take his point, though, and will make some prints locally for my next assignment.   He also brings up the issue of sharpening for screen and prints, which I overlooked entirely in my workflow.  I must keep this in mind for the next project.

Converging verticals:  The tutor regards this is a necessary component of workflow when photographing buildings.  He points to the Financial Center Night image as one which could be improved with lens correction.  This is actually something I include in my workflow and which I mentioned specifically in the Assignment notes as Lens Correct.  Adobe’s correction tools in the recent Lightroom 5 upgrade do a great job on most of the images I have ever corrected.  All the other photos in this series were corrected, if only slightly. The question is why I didn't correct the Financial Centre Night image.  After going back to look at it, the only thing that comes to mind is that I preferred the angle of the station as it was shot.  My LR history for this image reveals that I didn't try a correction.  But I have now and really don’t understand why I didn't do this earlier.  The corrected version looks almost as good.

Use of auto-correct in post-processing:  The tutor sees this as useful only for comparison.  I think what he’s advising is checking for elements of interpretation that can be borrowed, which is in fact how I use it.  The truth is, though, that the software makes some very useful suggestions.  The software engineers are professionals who know what a good image should look like.  Their baseline is very good.  The question seems to be do you want to do anything else with the image?  Do you want to make it look different, to put your own spin on it?  It is rare that I use auto-correct without adding a few tweaks.

External backup:  The tutor notes the absence in my workflow of external back-up services and suggests looking into several cloud-based archiving services.  He notes that most professional save to two separate local drives, in addition to backing-up the best parts of their catalogs to an external service such as SkyDrive or iCloud.  This is something I’ll have to look into.  Until now I haven’t felt much of my work has been worth the cost and effort, but at minimum I suppose I should be considering backing up work for the sake of my photography education.  While my photographs may never been seen by more than a few friends, classmates, tutors and assessors, there may someday be a real need to document my academic journey.

Reflection:  The tutor says I’ve missed the point of the reflection portion of the assignment, that rather than self-evaluation in terms of a grade, I should be using the opportunity to reflect on

• what you did,
• how well it fulfilled the terms of the assignment, perhaps visually academically intellectually.
• what you would do differently if you did it again.
• what you would take forward into your developing practice. 

I have included this type of reflection in all assignments so far, usually in a Discussion section, but I see now I failed to include it in this assignment.  Perhaps because I had gone over much the same material in several of the exercises I didn't see much point in repeating myself.  Assignments, of course, are for assessment, so in the future I ought to just go ahead and repeat myself as the assessor may not look carefully at the exercises.

I am happy to provide whatever is requested, but I don’t think I misunderstood the instructions as provided in the brief, which read:

Before you send this assignment to your tutor, take a look at the assessment criteria for this course, which will be used to mark your work when you get your work formally assessed.  The assessment criteria are listed in the introduction to this course.  Review how you think you have done against the criteria and make notes in your learning log.

I reproduced the assessment criteria in my blog, so I did in fact take a look and there is nothing in them about what I would do differently or what I got out of a particular assignment that will aid me in future assignments.  The brief says compare your work against the criteria.  If that’s not what tutors and assessors want, that’s fine.  Perhaps the assignment notes need rewriting.

Learning Blog:  The tutor says my blog is not easy to navigate because it contains content for two courses.  (This in spite of my clearing the layout with him before beginning.  Ah well.)  He suggests adding links direct to the DPP work, which I will most certainly do.  I haven’t yet gotten around to it because I didn't see it was all that important yet.  Links for every piece of blog material done for DPP was provided in the Assignment report, so there shouldn't have been any problem finding those.  The tutor seems most concerned that assessors be able to quickly access material relevant to the course being assessed.   Links for every piece of TAOP work were included in the material submitted for TAOP assessment, so that shouldn't be a problem.  I’ll do the same for DPP when the time comes.  In the meantime, I will continue to use tags as effectively as possible to avoid confusion for tutors and assessors.

Reference reading:  The tutor suggests the Lightroom/Photoshop series from Martin Evening (for thoroughness) and Scott Kelby (for ease of access).  Never heard of Mr Evening, but see he has quite the line of books.  I’ll have a look.

Things to consider for future shoots:  The tutor suggests working in the hour around twilight for the most interesting light, considering alternate light sources, and experimenting with under and over exposure to see what can be gained from the camera. As the next assignment requires shooting in jpeg with no post processing, experimenting with light will no doubt be imperative.  The tutor asks if I considered exploiting the full moon on this assignment shoot.  I had to do an internet search to confirm a full moon was on that night.  Not quite full, but almost.  Good catch, tutor!

Regarding revisions to the Assignment, I have corrected the Financial Centre Night image, but otherwise have left the report as is.

A couple of images that came out of this assignment shoot have sparked an interest to develop the idea further, a series of vertical interruptions.

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