Thursday, 6 July 2017

Assignment 5 presentation

I hope I've finally got my presentation ready to upload to my blog. I've tried many times and PowerPoint on Mac doesn't want to let the sound go with it so that's no good. I finally tried it on a PC laptop and it worked just like that. All that angst I went through to get there on the mac and it was created straight away on the PC.

Here goes, hope it works:

Wednesday, 8 March 2017

More thoughts

I've been giving my presentation a great deal of thought as I knew it wasn't right. It was my fault as I hadn't read the brief properly and only when I checked it again, I realised I had headed in the wrong direction. I aimed for history of photography, when I should have researched history of portrait photography.

I had to review and change the whole xxxx so redid the beginning but it still contained areas on technology instead of portrait photography. I've decided to revamp the mid section and concentrate more on photographers rather than on equipment although I do think the developments in technology do influence portrait styles.

Monday, 6 February 2017

Assignment 5 Oral Presentation - Tutor's Report

Feedback report on Assignment 5 in full

Overall Comments

Dear Jennifer

Thank you for sending me your fifth assignment.

Overall, there are some technical issues which you have encountered with this final assignment, although you have been researching how to overcome them. This is regarding an issue with audio and visual content marrying up on the Quicktime movie which you are still investigating, but have managed to successful achieve it on the PowerPoint and this is what I have listened to.

The presentation itself is rather wide ranging in its nature (I did advise you of this in the last feedback) and I do not feel you have answered all of the assignment brief, so there may be some more work to do on this or, subject to deadlines, it is something you can develop further in your sixth and final assignment. This brief asks you to include: ‘relevance to your own practice’ and ‘your future plans and direction and possible projects relating to this area of study. This ideally should have been incorporated into this presentation. You appear to have tried to incorporate too much information (over 100 years’ of history!) and even going back to cave paintings. This is far too much information, but instead needed to focus on some key portrait photographers (which you have done a little). You had the opportunity to develop this section and to have annotated the photographers’ work in more depth, using critical analysis skills and perhaps also bringing in some quotations from relevant key speakers or theorists, rather than just briefly touching on their work.

Towards the end of the presentation, you have gone off on a tangent by starting to look at technology within photography which is a separate subject area in itself. The reference to ‘Whats App’ is not even directly related to photography, whereas something like Instagram is and is also used by fashion photographer Nick Knight which would have been more relevant. I would recommend that most of this final section is edited out and re-worked with the missing information about your own work, mentioned above, or developed further in Assignment 6 subject to time constraints.

Feedback on assignment

Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity

You appear to have spent a long time transcribing your talk and then reading off your written work as you move through each slide. I would recommend for future reference when using PowerPoint that you type your notes onto the PowerPoint in the Notes section (which is underneath the slide that the audience sees). This way you print off your whole PowerPoint (Print > Settings > Slides > Print Layout > Notes Pages) so it will print out the PowerPoint slides with the visuals you have used and your notes underneath. You have done this, so I am unsure why I have also been sent two other separate documents including pages with just the images on and also a separate script (with tables, arrows etc) which you have clearly spent a lot of time on. This has cost you valuable hours / days of time which is unnecessary.

As for giving a presentation, I would highly recommend that you type bullet points of some key words into each slide which should prompt you into talking about your subject area in order that you do not need to read off the whole text.

Of course you can use your notes to help and support you in remembering all that you have researched, but just reading every word off your script can lose the air of energy and spontaneity about your subject which can make all the difference to your audience when they are listening to you. If you just read off your script which lacks any sort of excitement or enthusiasm, then the audience will switch off.

All images used in your PowerPoint should be of high quality which most appear to be, although one of the images on Slide 5 looked a little stretched. Images should ideally appear immediately on the slide, rather than the viewer staring at a blank slide for many seconds or a minute before an image appears. Having an image appear immediately will give something of interest for the viewer to see whilst they listen to you.

All images should also be Harvard Referenced, stating the name of the image, the photographer, the date it was taken and the source (book / website). If you cannot find the name of the photographer, you can use ‘Unknown Photographer’ to show that you have attempted to research this, but it should always be possible to list the website you have obtained the on-line image and the date you accessed the website at the very least. This will prevent any issues surrounding copyright and plagiarism.

You have included another document detailing the bibliography. Again, this really should be written in Harvard Referenced format, rather than compartmentalizing it all on a table which you have spent a long time typing up in this format. Just a final slide on the PowerPoint with the Bibliography Harvard Referenced would have sufficed in this instance, separating sections into books, E-books, websites, exhibitions etc. and saved you a massive amount of time.

Example of how it should be written is here:

Books

Clarke, M. (2007) Verbalising the Visual : Translating Art and Design into Words. Lausanne; Worthing: AVA Academia

Websites

National Media Museum, Bradford (no date) [Web site]. Available at: http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org (Accessed: 07 April 2016).

Impressions Gallery (no date) [Web site]. Available at: http://www.impressions-gallery.com (Accessed: 07 April 2016).

Exhibitions

The National Media Museum, Bradford. Insight Research Centre [Visited 27 January 2016]

Coursework

Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity

You have stated in your letter that you are on with updating your Blog so I will look at this again when I received Assignment 6.

Research

Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis

You have clearly done a lot of research into your PowerPoint presentation, but be careful of just going over factual evidence. Try to incorporate some discussion or debate into your work. Find some photographers who are a little controversial in nature and don’t be afraid to ask some difficult questions of their work, even if you do not know the answers!

Learning Log

Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis

You have attended some lovely exhibitions and have written some interesting and reflective thoughts on what you have seen so this is now a step in the right direction. I particularly liked reading about Pauline Rook and the reference you made to James Ravilious. Always try to then incorporate what you have researched and learnt from the visit into how it can inform your own work (if at all). A compare and contrast of the two photographers would also have been an interesting project.

Finding reading recommendations

My tutor recommended that I should read a book on art critiquing called:

A Short Guide to Writing About Art Paperback by Sylvan Barnet and published by Pearson in 2014.

As the paperback book is £28 and the Kindle edition is even more at £37.99 I requested it from my local library. Unfortunately it is not available in the local area, so now I will still have to pay the lesser amount of £6 and wait for how ever long it takes to come to my local library.

I used to buy some of these recommended books but found it was becoming too costly so endeavour to use my local library where I have got to know the head librarian who is nothing but helpful in my quest for the obscure books that are recommended to read.

Wednesday, 25 January 2017

PowerPoint presentation

Oh, how I have struggled with the presentation. It's becoming a nightmare to co-ordinate the slides with the voice over. Then, when it was all in order with animations and voice over in co-ordination, I saved it as a movie only to find that the voice over did not transfer to the .mov .

It turns out that I have to use iMovie, once I have converted the slides into images (.jpgs) and, yet again, record the script over the images but with no fancy animations to enhance. That probably means that without animations it will be shorter than the requirement of 15 minutes.

I save the whole presentation to be PPT 1997-2003 format hoping that it could be played by people with no PowerPoint to comment on the whole thing but it wouldn't work. I checked out on the Office website that there was a download that enabled you to see it but to no avail. I'm having to create a full movie with audio channel to get the necessary comments to support my submission.

Thursday, 12 January 2017

Oral Presentation notes

Whilst I've been working on this presentation using PowerPoint I can see that I've not been posting my thoughts and research to put this together.

I was also under the assumption that I needed to give a presentation to an audience using my slides but after reading an entry on the OCA Photography Facebook it turns out that I can do a voice-over instead.

I've had to work hard to get the slides and voice-over to appear together. In fact, I'm now running 3 weeks' late in handing this assignment in.

Screenshot of oral presentation

I've prepared 19 slides and written the script but am finding it hard to get through the whole voice-over without stumbling over my words. I spent 4 hours on Monday morning (9th January) going over and over to try to get through the whole script and slides but with to no avail.

I was gazing at the screen when I suddenly saw the Pause button and realised that I could talk over a couple of slides, pause, take a drink and carry on. The programme shows the timings as you go along so I can co-ordinate the gaps between each slide by watching the clock.

I have been working on my assignments at a local computer centre where I hire a small meeting room twice a week. This gives me an incentive to get on as there are no distractions or windows to look out.

I'm back there tomorrow (13th January) in the hopes that I can work through the whole thing and be done with it.

Friday, 21 October 2016

Outline of presentation

I've been giving it some thought about the areas of portrait photography to cover in my presentation. There's such a wealth of information about how to put together a presentation on the internet that it's hard to separate the useful from not relevant.

One point made is that I should have between 12-16 slides to last for 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes doesn't sound very long but it can seem forever if talk not properly prepared.

I think the ouline will look like this:

Tutor name	Katrina Whitehead
Date	29.01.17
Next assignment due	23.03.17 (final deadline submitted by OCA Head Office)