First experiments

Following my proposal based on the writings of Roland Barthes And photography of Thomas Ruff, I wanted to start developing technically the direction I will go on this project.

I started off by finding an image from an old shoot to try out different scanning options on. I scanned the negative originally to 1200 ppi (pixels per inch) and compressed the image to a minimum so I could have a high-resolution image to refer to. I then dropped the dpi down to 75 ppi so that less data was captured, and turned the jpeg compression up so that more pixels were combined together in the image. It was important to experiment with these variables to be able to remove enough data to exercise my concept but not so much that the image is unrecognisable.

Fig 1:

Fig 2:

Fig 3:

Fig 1: Original image from a 35mm shoot I did a few weeks ago (for reference).
Fig 2: High ppi (1200 ppi), High jpeg compression. Colours merge together but the detail is retained.
Fig 3: Low ppi (75 ppi), High jpeg compression. All detail is merged and lost.

Manchester

I spent the weekend in Machester seeing some friends whose moved to university there. I brought with me a 35mm disposable camera to capture the memories from that weekend which I would then develop back home in London.

I originally scanned the negatives to a standard high-quality resolution (1200 ppi, average 12MB per image) And then took each image into Photoshop to start the digital manipulation. The technique I found most effective at achieving the 'over-compressed' aesthetic Was to change the pixel width of the image to 100 pixels and then when exporting the image, To drag on the slider determinating how much quality will be saved to the lower end of the spectrum but not so low that the image loses all detail & becomes a combination of around 5 block colours.