The square - Evaluation

When we were handed the new brief for ‘The Square’ my mind went blank and I couldn’t think of anything to do. The fact that we needed to have a concept behind our images that we would produce is probably want made me go blank as I didn’t quite understand the term ‘concept’. At the start of this new project I was actually quite nervous as I just couldn’t come up with a concept that I could show through my work. I thought the best thing I could do would be to start doing some research on concepts and photographers, surprisingly after I came up with an idea and had done some further research in to it coming up with a concept was so easy. My original idea I had was to do something like being an adult but still wanting the mindset of a child. I was going to show this by having a model in a park, woods etc. places where young kids like to play and be imaginative. The model was then going to be wearing something like a ‘dress up’ dress and have a balloon tide around them making them look like they were off the ground looking down. I was going to do this by using my Photoshop skills as it’s a really easy technique. Before I did this I looked at the photographer Kyle Thompson who does a lot of self-portraits and a wide range of levitation photography, his work is very surreal. This hasn’t been the first time I’ve looked in to Kyle Thompson so being able to go back and remember information I had found out before made it all so much easier as it didn’t mean I had to spend hours researching and looking in to his work. My second original idea for when we created the mood boards was to use slow shutter speed and a piece of fruit and have an image of the fruit being squished and having that captured. But then I didn’t really have a concept behind that and it wouldn’t have met the brief. But unfortunately my model couldn’t make the shoots so I was left with nothing with little time left on this project. Luckily enough I’d done a recent shoot at Looe beach and thought I could use the concept of the environment and how things change quickly over time. Things worked out for the best this way as I am more confident with my final images now and how they have turned out then I think I would have been if I went for my first original idea. I think my idea now tides in quite well with the brief, the concept behind it is how things in the environment start to change and decay. I’ve shown this through abstraction using different tools on Photoshop. Once I decided to do a shoot for this project on the environment I didn’t have much time to do research so I looked at environments like the woods and the beach. I wanted to have an original image of how something looked and then over time how it decayed. But obviously I had little time so I thought I would take a picture of something and the make it abstract by changing colours and shapes and sizes and show possible outcomes of it changing overtime. I think the quality of my images turned out really well, I’m most proud of the depth of field and the lighting, it was all just right and the image is focused on exactly what I wanted and it shows all the right colours and textures.

We did a number of small workshops and photo challenges through this project like an abstraction shoot and how to work in raw on our cameras. Everything we did we then had to upload to out blog as they were like our work books which was easy to keep on top of as I just added it to my blog on the bus ride home as I could easily do off of my phone. I was good at time management, everything has been kept up to date and things I have missed I have found out about and added to my blog and done my own research in to it. Through this project I worked well in teams with people in task sharing ideas and I was always able to communicate my ideas and get them across to other people, I was also good at listening and taking advice on how to do things so I could better my work. I loved doing new things with this project, so far this has been my most enjoyable one as I managed to get with terms with everything.