Data collection on Atmosphere

Based on feedback received in the last seminar session I have decided to rethink my question and some example images and get the survey participants to feedback to see whether or not those images are atmospheric. Choosing images have proven to be a difficult task in itself I do not want to bombard the survey respondents with loads and loads of images so in order to have a balance or enough images to explore the theme of atmosphere and not have so many of the survey respondents will not complete survey I have elected to go with 10 images the survey participants will rank each of the images more like heart scale from not atmospheric to very atmospheric and I still want to leave atmospheric up through discretion they will decide. 

With these 10 images I do encounter the potential problem that the service respondents will compare the images to one another to attempt to mitigate this I will ask this survey participants to consider in their minds eye what they consider to be atmospheric and then to consider each image on its own on its atmospheric merits however the survey respondents will subconsciously be influenced by the preceding images may attempt to rank the images in the terms of atmospherics which is not necessarily what I would want them to do especially if I'm trying to get an overall feeling of what atmospheric is rather than is this image more atmospheric than that image. 

the selection of the 10 images is proving to be difficult on the one hand I want to include images that I believe catch atmosphere and from my research I know that atmosphere has been associated with weather events so I will include a picture that contain atmospheric weather but I also want to include images that do not contain weather that I think atmospherics well but also I need to include images which I do not think are atmospheric and perhaps both in the context of a weather scene as well as other images. Another point of consideration is I do not want to associate atmospheric images with the quality of the image so again I'll have to find images that I think are not atmospheric but art of high quality and standard now whether or not people think images are good is highly subjective so one person thinks good another may not so all I really can go on is what I think are good images and images that I felt I've got good feedback on. I feel that I'm going to have to use a collection of images that both going to incorporate my own images and images of others for example I do not have any portrait images that I believe are atmospheric so have a photographer who has produced what I think are atmospheric portraits and I believe I'll add those in. I also have the problem of how many pictures I enter into the service life the gap is broken how many I think is or not again the ratio of this would influence the server response but I want to give them enough diversity in images so that they can say whether or not they think images atmospheric or not and not just simply select all images atmospheric. 

In addition problem images whether to include images again in my research one of the authors believe that monochrome although I was about able to find evidence to counter this I do somewhat believe that black and white does have the ability to convey atmosphere and if my book is to be encompassing different methods atmosphere I should include black and white but again I have the problem that it might survey by include black and white images it may affect the way that they have read in comparison to the others so as a further complication to my research. 

In addition to this I went to a talk on Monday with a landscape photographer, Colin Westgate (2021), and during the break I asked them what they believe the atmosphere was from their perspective as they were landscape photographer it was all based on weather elements as far as I can tell I recorded the conversation and the main aspect they came up with in terms of atmosphere was the ability to record or present your feelings in the moment you take the picture and that's what he constituted is atmosphere. He also said that in every case of an image that he took the camera was unable to capture the atmosphere that he felt and in every case he had to post process image to recreate emotions or the mood of the image that the camera failed to capture so for him atmosphere was created in the darkroom. As a result of my question during the second part of his talk he did then highlight images that he believed contained atmosphere funny enough the images that he highlighted to the audience I agreed we're atmospheric they contained elements which I believe create the atmosphere that I laid out in my research in that small specular highlights Pinterest where the majority of the rest of the images is in the dark tones it was very interesting but from the questions I posed to him changed the way that he delivered his content the second half referring more to atmosphere

On reflection having access to photographers and through my photography clump does mean that I am able to quiz them during their presentations between the break their presentations. We have photographer next week will be talking about portraiture and what I will do is I'll ask them the same question in terms of what do they mean by atmosphere I was lucky this week that the present, talked quite a bit about atmosphere and I want to see whether or not other photographers who do not take pictures of landscapes also talk about this fear. 

I'm also considering adding questions whereby the saver respondent is presented with two images side by side with two different post processing techniques added to them so compositionally the images will be identical disable respondent would then be asked to pick which image for them is more atmospheric. In this case the images will have to be my own postprocess them in different ways and invariably one of the images will be what I consider to be atmospheric rather than an objective considering of the term. 

I will keep the last part of the survey whereby the survey respondents with evaluate their responses clarifying if there are any common elements in the images they have selected to contain atmosphere hopefully by them going through the process of looking at images first then deciding whether or not those images are atmospheric I will get more concise set of answers and perhaps we would like to lead to some sort of agreement if in case there was but with this I'm basing my research on 10 images I select 10 images hardly the breadth and scope of the photographic world which means any inferences that I can gather from their responses may have very limited real world impact.