Photography

This project was all about 'a day in the life' which gave us a lot of freedom to go off and be creative and do whatever we wanted in our images - I found this difficult to achieve as I prefer being given a base on what to do for projects, however, I think the outcome for my final images was good. At the beginning of this project I initially thought on doing minimalism and negative space - incorporating architecture to do this - I wanted to find bright & colourful buildings and take images of parts of the architecture to give a minimal effect. I researched a few artists for this idea; such as Nicholas Goodden who did a body of work on urban minimalism - I loved his work as it was similar to what I intended to do for my first idea. I think my research definitely had a big impact on my first idea, however, I then proceeded to gradually change my idea as I went out on more and more test shoots. I eventually decided on the idea to show how colour and black and white photos can change the mood/ feelings toward an image. The outcome of my second idea came out a lot better than my first - I feel that this is because I was more focused on this idea.

I think that I did use my time well for this project but I also didn't - I mainly focused on taking images for the project instead of putting the majority of my time into my blog, however, I feel I still got the work that I needed to do completed. I also think I put a good amount of effort into my work - especially all of the images I took - I take my camera pretty much everywhere so I was constantly taking images and seeing how I could interpret them into my work. I think overall for productivity I produced a good amount of work - like I said - maybe could have tried to focus more on my blog and use my time more effectively, however, i'm pleased with what I have achieved.

On the technical side of things - I used my own camera, which is a canon 1200D - with the kit lens (18mm-55mm) and a telephoto lens (75mm-300mm). I took all my photos in raw and jpeg so I had one of each - so I could edit the raw in camera raw + higher quality images and in jpeg so I could easily put on my photography Instagram. I also took some images in monochrome to see how they would come out. I edited the majority of my images in Photoshop on camera raw.

As far as personal development goes, I think that my eye for image changes all of the time - one minute I'll be doing one type of image and the next I'll be experimenting with something else. I think social networking has a huge impact on my image ideas, as i'm constantly seeing new/creative photography on places like Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram - in fact some of my artist research was based on photographers on Tumblr and Instagram so I would say my research certainly does impact how my images come out.

I faced one challenge during this project - which was for my initial first idea - I live in an area where there are not many 'big, bright and colourful' buildings, so I would've had to of travelled to achieve this idea and this would've been very time consuming - this was mainly one of the reasons why I changed my idea slightly as I think if I had of stuck to my first idea then I wouldn't of been as successful as I have been with my final images. I think that this challenge has taught me to try and be more realistic within my work, by saying this I mean that I should try and link my ideas to something that doesn't include as much travelling etc..,especially for projects that aren't extremely long.

I feel that I did meet the brief/proposal for this project as it was quite a broad proposal in terms of ideas. It does show a day in my life - as I took these images at Charles town harbour, which reflects on my life because I like to go to harbours/beaches in my spare time for good photo opportunities.

During the course of this project, one of the main highlights for me was definitely going to mount
Edgecumbe, as we got a amazing photo opportunity and was showed things that most of the public don't know exist - which was the whole point of us taking photo's for them because they needed people to see what was actually there.

For the progression part of this project we were given a couple of lectures on 'unit 9' which was essentially what we wanted to do in the future and how we plan on achieving it. In my unit 9 part of the project, I explained that I wanted to go to university and perhaps study journalism as I feel that going to university will benefit me more than going straight into a full time job. I am still contemplating on what i'd like to do when I leave college, however, I definitely want to go to Uni, I'm just not 100% sure which course I'd like to do yet.We were also given a time limit on this part of the project so I felt that I managed my time with that slightly better than the rest of the project.

In terms of what grade I think I should be getting - I think I will hopefully get a pass - I'd love to get a merit or even a distinction, however, I don't think my work is at this standard just yet as it is only my first year.

Did I enjoy the project? - Well I did love the fact that we were allowed to work more freely and independently to past projects, however, I thought the project dragged slightly and towards the end I began to become fed up with doing it.

Overall, i'm pleased with how my FMP turned out, and I think that my images fit well with my completed idea.

I chose these 3 images as my final images because I feel that they are the strongest images out of the shoot that I did in Charles town. I really like these images because I feel they fit well together, although two are landscape and one is portrait. I felt that these images had quite a 'film' effect to them which I like because they look older. I particularly like the first and last as they include two complete stranger who I found interesting at the time - the people in both images aren't in the center either - I purposely did this to achieve the 'minimal' effect that I wanted to use in the first place. I also used black and white because I didn't feel that colour would achieve the full effect of the images that I planned in my head.