This has been a busy week personally and professionally with several key client presentations, proposals to write for a major project in 2022 as well as complementing assignment 2 of this module the Illustrated proposal. 

The Illustrated proposal was a challenge in that at this stage I haven’t decided the direction of my final project. ‘The other side of the Track’ started life purely as a vehicle to gain my ARPS but since then it has grown in respect to the output of the project with an exhibition and magazine article planned and whilst there are plenty of opportunities to build on this for my final major project (FMP)I’m struggling how to rationalise how best to move it forward in a way that meets the demands of the MA as well as being something I enjoy and can see myself working on over the next 18 months. 

The assignment gave me the opportunity to at least spend some time thinking about my FMP and whilst I managed to pull together some ideas of options for practical work in the next module, I haven’t yet come to any decisions which way I will go. What it did do was to give me some structure to the ideas that I have and also to outline possible research areas that I can start to follow up.

There are several potential areas where this this project can be expanded this can include

• Expanding to look at slate mines which the railway was built to service in the 1850’s
• The industrial landscape around North Wales which has recently been awarded World Heritage status.
• Integrating the railway into the wider landscape
• Move away from candid imagery and to experiment with posed imagery
• Research of the Talyllyn archives and link into the Rev. Awdry’s little engines book

I need to spend some time over the Christmas break to narrow my intentions for the work in progress portfolio in the next module!

The final module of the course was looking at reality and truth in photography and image manipulation. Manipulating images or ‘Photoshopping’ as it tends to be referred to in the media is something that I do not do in my photographic practice. The reasons for this are twofold on a purely technical basis my photoshop skills are nowhere near good enough for me to consider any form of manipulation and composite photographs are something that do not appeal to me I certainly don’t have the artistic bent nor the patience to spend the length of time necessary to produce this type of image.

Away from physically manipulating have I used an image or a sequence of images to tell a narrative I want to tell and to show something in a better light, then the answer is yes, I have, and will no doubt do so again. Photography can show fact and actual reality as well as fictional ideas and represent them as real!

This weeks image comes from a concert at Cricket St Thomas with Britain’s Got Talent winners Collabro