Photo Essay - Sporting Equipment: Stirling Coates and Elliot Mills-Connolly

Sporting Equipment

By Stirling Coates and Elliot Mills-Connolly

For our photo essay Stirling and I decided to focus on sporting equipment as both our theme and sub theme. sporting equipment was chosen due to the “everyday aesthetic” (Murray, 2008, pg. 147) of sport, particularly the importance of sport on day to day life in Australia. We see sporting equipment as part of day to day life in Australia that is generally overlooked, thus feeling that we should use this as a perfect example of Harmon’s view that "The nature of photography now is it’s in motion. It doesn’t stop time anymore, and maybe that’s a loss. But there’s a kind of beauty to it" (Harmon, 2005, pg. 1).  Sport is a theme we both feel is a great topic due to the fast paced 'blink and you will miss it' nature of photography while being something that can be captured by the ‘amateur’ due to its accessibility and day to day presence in todays society.

In editing this photo essay through iMovie and iPhoto, we decided that it was best to use filters for the photos as it helped even out the quality of the photos by making them similar through slightly distorting both the higher resolution photos and lower resolution photos to make them feel more balanced. We took the photos outside and around Sydney too show the equipment used in natural setting and also give some variety in environments and lighting. Transitions where also used to help with the flow of the presentation and ultimately bring the presentation together in a nice complete package. 

We chose the song “Starflex” by StatueOfDiveo due to the fast beat and tempo, as we feel that it accurately portrays the heart pounding intensity of sport as a whole while fitting the 30 second time frame that we are limited to. this is combined with the editing to create a quick and concise way to demonstrate the photos we have taken, while being engaging to the audience.

References:

Murray, S 2008 'Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics', Journal of Visual Culture, vol 7, no. 2.

Harmon, Amy (2005) ‘Stop Them Before They Shoot Again’, New York Times, 5th May: Section G, Column 4, pg 1.


Music - “Starflex” by StatueOfDiveo (2011) Creative Commons: Attribution Share-Alike http:/www.jamendo.com/en/track/832955/starflex