What a cold start to the day, beautiful sunny weather and a blue sky.
Sat in MK202 doing my dissertation research into art therapy so that it can be brought into the framework which will be mentioned at the end of the essay.
Meg, Brian and Shellie arrived and discussion with Brian about the resolution of his image as he had taken an image from a microscope and the camera attached to it was one of the lower end digital cameras, I think he said a Canon 100. I suppose that the scientists are less concerned about the clarity or the resolution of the image as they are looking at something magnified hundreds or thousands times.
At 10:30 I went up to work with Jim and we looked at the file that he would be printing for me and there was another artist in there who was doing some work about the occult and black magic, who grew up opposite Pendle hill in Lancashire where there were witch trials in the early 17th century. He was printing black ink onto black paper using the Risograph and also a laser printer , was hugely tricky to read but was quite effective.
Jim helped me to print out my work and said that he would now have to mount it on the black edged Foamex board. I had chosen a width of the image equivalent to A2 ish, but the image was shot on a 16:9 ratio format from my DJI Mini 4 Pro. The limiting factor was the resolution on this image, it is an 8064×4536 pixel image. At 300 ppi this equates to 26.88″ x 15.12″ size without losing any quality. Jim said that although the file needed to be submitted at 300 ppi, I could have resized it so that the true resolution would be more like 200 ppi and I could still get a usable quality image to put on a wall.
To do this I would have my image at 27×15 inches at 300 ppi, then decrease the resolution to 200 ppi in the image resize dialog box in photoshop. This would then increase the image dimensions to 40×23″ at 200 ppi without a real loss of quality (according to Jim), meaning it would still look good on the wall, maybe not in a book but on an exhibition wall yep. To get the file to be the same size at 300 ppi I would use the resize again but hold the size the same and increase the ppi which then introduces some resampling. Resampling = filling in the gaps between pixels with an average or a more suitable colour. I had chosen to print it on white titanium lustre paper too which really makes the reflective windows look more metallic.
You’ve Been Framed
Once this was on it’s way out of the printer he asked me to take the form up to Tom on the fourth floor who would put together the frame and I should leave the paperwork with him. Only when I got up to the laser room as recommended, there was no sign, I hung around for a while, had a wander around the workshops still nobody and then went and sat in the basement studio for a while. Marie I’d spoken to earlier had told me that Tom normally goes out for lunch and would be back at around 13:00.
After 1’o’clock I headed back up and still no sign, so I wandered around, looking at the offices around to see of there was any sign, but no. That’s when I bumped into my tutor Gavin, who took me to Tom’s office on the fifth floor where one of his colleagues, Mark, told us that he was not in today but that he would give him the paperwork for me.
I had a chat with Gavin down the stairs about my dissertation and he told me to keep going and to have a look at a website called Photovoice for a template of some art therapy. He also said that he was ok with my picture that I had chosen and that it was all the right ppi and file format etc. He said he was surprised to see some students still submitting work off very low resolution cameras and that it was difficult to explain that they won’t be able to print at A1 without looking like poor quality.
After I left Gavin and headed to the library I saw Euripides briefly who had asked about the printing and I said it had gone well. I asked him if he was ok with the image I’d chosen to print and he said that he wasn’t keen on the abstract nature of the concrete but the windows looked good. I guess he meant that it was not easy to tell what the concrete was a part of but that he was ok with it. He said, I’m just being honest, which I was happy to hear. I’d much prefer that someone is honest with me and able to feel comfortable giving me some advice as it’s a good way of me learning.
Over to the library area and I grabbed a coffee in the Deli Moon Café whilst writing up these notes and continuing on with some more of my dissertation. Once coffeed up and a trip to library I was headed home to carry on with more of the dissertation.
AI Interpretation
For the resize part of the post above, I wanted to resize an image to see what the options were in the Photoshop window, so I opened iup photoshop created a new image with the dimensions of 27×15 at 300 ppi and then did an AI Generative creation using Adobe Firefly. I entered this as the prompt:
picture of the front of a plain office block made out of concrete with four rows of windows going across the full frame, each of the rows has a mixture of clear windows and some with coloured reflective film in a blue, orange or gold colour. The reflections in the windows should be showing a shropshire landscape distorted by the blackpool fun house mirror style windows and also include a reflection of a doric column surrounded by scaffolding.
The prompt came from my memory of my image that was printed and how I thought I should describe it for the generation program. The image this prompt produced was:
My actual image was as below. Looking at it now I realise I forgot to prompt about it being blue hour and seing car headlights and streetlights being reflected in the windows too.
Reflection
Overall, it was a frustrating day of trying to get some dissertation done, but then being distracted, then trying to get the print completed and passed on to the framer that was left hanging. I wasn’t sure when it would all be complete but I’ll find out in week 11.
The print came out of the printer looking nice too, on the titanium lustre paper and I was very happy with that. Looking forwad to seeing it when it is complete. Now it’s time to turn to the dissertation and gettign that finished before the December 8th hand in date. Wish me luck.
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