The Untitled piece is a photograph I took on an analogue camera and I have no idea what it is of.
Soft Hand is a digital photograph, which is clearly not fully in focus. I was going to delete this one as soon as I took it, but I often keep bad photographs so that I can edit them in Photoshop to see if I can improve them.
They are technical mistakes made during test shoots for a wider project, Diligence. The images were meant to be exposures of outside only, as I was practising shooting through a window at night, to gain a higher vantage point on my subject. Due to the windows reflections and the lighting from inside the images resulted in these interesting compositions that I describe as ‘inside out’.
The images were both taken with my underwater camera when I was snorkelling in a bay called Punta Prima in Menorca. Both images were my attempt to catch some small, colourful and very fast fish which were darting around in the sunlight near the surface.
Both images as you can see are distorted and blurred due to camera movement. Although they are both ‘mistakes’ to the extent that the images do not capture my intention, I actually rather like them as abstract images.
Some mistakes I have made in photography.
One is simply because I left my iPhone case on! The other, I was taking on the tube while trying to stand still while the train was moving, so is very blurry.
These images were taken as part of my recording process for my MA Fine Art degree, where I capture photographically different points in my art process.
As you can see, unfortunately, these images did not record properly and therefore ‘failed’.
The exciting thing is that I see the image on the screen in the folder almost as it should be and then when opened it takes on a different image each time. I like the way that the digital element has influenced the work, creating a hybrid.
These images have been produced from the over exposed ends of rolls of photographic colour film. They are mistakes in that they have been produced accidentally whilst loading the film into the camera, yet retain a certain aesthetic quality.
I like the way that the images retain some recognisable structures and shapes, whilst the over-exposure has made part of the image reminiscent of abstract painting.
Bring me your tired, your poor, your cast offs, the pictures that nobody wants, the photos that will never see the light of day – I will rescue them from waste bins real and virtual and give them a home here, amongst their brethren. For we must remember that photography is but the fixing of a moment between world and camera, and that sometimes these moments are beyond our control.
Call for contributors to a project which explores the times when technology fails us. I’m looking for your photographic ‘mistakes’ : images that are blurred, out of focus, under exposed, distorted or failed in some way – the ones that get thrown away or deleted. Send them to me instead!
In Pursuit of Error 