Week 4: Collaboration or left to play with each other? The learning experience started by finding others within the Dover cohort to work with on a project for the week, with presentations to our peers due at the end of the week.
What would be learnt this week? Well if nothing else it would have to be how to work with others would be my position however, that would be way to simplistic an out come.
How do we collaborate? Where do we start? were defiantly first thoughts but fortunately, the weeks’ structure gave a simple lead into starting the collaboration, and now with reflection of the weeks’ materials, discussions and activity I realise these have been answered along with a whole lot more creating a solid grounding for future collaboration.
With a forum filling up with prospective mini projects to choose from it felt that we were under starters orders and the mad race to find a dance partner had begun. I felt that there were clear winners for me to choose and some none starters as well. Each prospective partner had presented an image to reflect what they like or had interest in. When do you select the right one? The pace of the new offerings seamed to be a crawl, waiting to see what the next hour brought while risking a group being formed around a project you were interested in.
Too long.
The first person I approached had a group, he had joined in on another’s idea. Another image, another possible group. Forming a group on Canvas, headway was being made.
The who, what, when, where and how was soon put in place with good communication through the forum. I feel the collaboration task would have been a lot harder without the forum, which enabled the group to distribute information outside of timezones and schedules and any late joiners get up to speed as and when they could.
Our project started with the premise of showing the change in the local area. I felt that documenting the change from a local book on my home town would produce the required images. I was disappointed after my first shoot. That I had failed in the task of showing. The local town has changed so little my pictures matched the old ones.
With further collaboration allowing us to realise that we had not developed our idea fully. In fact, what is “Change”? the idea behind our work. Change can not be found where there is apparently none. Look further there is a change in the image, just not on the scale of other locations. This highlights that its the variation of change we are looking at by using different geographic locations.
Another trip out to capture more images for my section and the project being understood better we had a successful conference session. We now had all the images and materials to finish the PDF for presentation in our separate tutor groups at the end of the week.
I feel the smooth transition from start to finish was accomplished with strong communication between us with ideas growing through discourse.
The projects reception during the presentation I felt was very positive and well received which reaffirmed my belief that we had produce a successful project.
One aspect of our small project included the use of Google street view to document change over a period of time. Is this a valid to use a resource like this in a project, when its not our own work? Clearly we felt that it was acceptable because its included. It’s not the core of the work its’s part of the work to support the context of the project with additional views of the progression of change.
With the feedback and the presentation done its time to ask what could be done differently or better? I do not feel that in the time we had we could have done much better because image production through whatever method does require time. The highlighting of clarity in the direction may have been more defined with a conference call very early on, but I don’t think we knew that we did not know so starting early was better for us.
It shows from a small adventure into collaboration that its a very useful to that a photographer can choose to use just in the same way they may choose what lens to use. I feel that other groups had a similar route through the week and the projects produced were to a good standard. With the group “Band” producing a very cohesive set of 5 images. The Black and White images were about the members of a band from the instruments played. I do not feel that this corpus of work could be produced without clear communication during the collaboration.
Finished PDF
Bibliography
Swanage Past, David Lewer and Dennis Smale, Phillimore & Co Ltd, Chichester.
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