Activity 7.3.4 Visual Narrative

This particular activity is causing some anguish for students of T189 because of a perceived discrepancy between the instructions and the illustration of the concept on the website. The instructions actually say ” Spend up to one hour taking three images which, when displayed consecutively, tell a story” but the example, displayed above the instructions, shows a single image sliced diagonally into six sections, each illustrating one frame taken as a man with a rucksack on his back jumps from one rock to another.

I understood the assignment instructions to mean that I had to take three (or more) images narrating a progression of actions or situations. But many students have interpreted it to mean producing one image comprising several shots of the progression. Since this isn’t actually demonstrated in any of the tutorials, it has left many students feeling lost and frustrated because they don’t know how to go about it using the Elements digital darkroom.

Of course, the gurus and detectives of the T189 conferences were quickly onto the problem and came up with various suggestions and instructions involving opening multiple images, tiling, cascading, resizing and so on. So there is an interesting mix of images being put up on OpenStudio. You know, you could get seriously bogged down in Elements trying to learn and use some of these effects!

When you upload your three narrative images to OpenStudio there’s a good chance that the three won’t be displayed consecutively anyway – if a lot of students are uploading at the same time, which is often the case in the evenings and at weekends, then there may be two, three or more other images between your three. I think this is probably why so many students are attempting the three-in-one approach.

I’m trying hard not to get hung up on some of the more complex tasks. This week’s recommendation is a total of up to five hours ‘in the field’ taking photographs and I can’t see me getting anywhere near that! But I have successfully completed the tutorial to ‘age’ a photograph and now have some very nice sepia images of Arum Lilies, boats, coils of rope and Coastguard Tower. So I am making progress