26 September 2010

I worked on evaluating and processing the photographs I'd taken at Battle and Pevensey. I identified several candidates that I felt were good enough to form part of the final assignment.

I carried out some detailed planning into the October trip to France so as to identify the various key Assignment 5 locations in a number of French towns: Lillebonne, Jumieges, Caen, Bayeux, Dives sur Mer and St Valery sur Somme.

The challenge in Assignment 5 will be to take photographs that evoke the character of the various locations, while recognising that after 1,000 years there are few visible traces of William the Conqueror's passage en route to England.  Nevertheless, the storyline needs to come through in some way. The individual photos need to stand on their own merits as good and relevant compositions.

24 September 2010

I devoted the day to TAOP, first driving to Battle in Sussex to investigate the site and to make plans for visiting it on 9th October for the annual reenactment of the 1066 battle. Doing this enabled me to fulfil Exercise 62: Researching an Event. I spent several hours walking around the abbey and battlefield to familiarise myself with its layout and to find good vantage points. I spoke to staff about the event in order to determine the best time to be there to take photographs.  I looked at the images on the English Heritage literature and booklets to see how they had approached the subject matter.  I also took a number of photographs, one or two of which may find their way into the assignment.

I then visited Pevensey Castle and subsequent Pevensey Bay, both being key William the Conqueror locations and took photographs of those locations with the aim of some of them finding their way into the final assignment. I was lucky with the weather, it being a showery day with some dramatic cloud formations.

21 September 2010

I spent several hours researching William the Conqueror on the web and in books, so as to have a clear picture of the history and the relevant locations in France and England.  This confirmed my feeling that his route to the 1066 battlefield would provide a suitable storyline to be the basis of Assignment 5.

19 September 2010

I did a lot of thinking about the final TAOP assignment and the exercises leading up to it. I considered a number of options for an Assigment 5 storyline, rejecting a friend's wedding in France as being both too hackneyed a subject as well as being too risky, particularly with the deadline of end of October looming. I ended up homing in on the route that William the Conqueror took through France and into England on his way to the 1066 battlefield. This would use the planned trip to France in October to take photographs of the various W the C French locations.