Photography evaluation

Photography Evaluation

As a last project for our photography unit we were assigned to create our own pictures of our own choice for an article for a selected magazine. Before hand we had learnt valuable skills and techniques to help us produce elucidating images, and what we had learnt would come in handy for the last project.

Once given the assignment brief I followed each task required, most of it being pre production work to help us build up to the end result. In class I took it upon myself to brainstorm ideas of what I’d like to photograph which would then lead into creating a mood board. My initial idea was to take urban grungy fashion pictures for either the We Love page on the Topshop website which is basically a regularly updated blog which shows us the latest trends and ordinary people’s links to their blogs to show how they wore it and what they think. Another place I wanted to feature my images was the Grazia Magazine which is very familiar to people especially those that have an insatiable love for fashion and trends.  I made sure that I looked through the Grazia Magazine myself to see what their target audience was and what they feature inside; it looked like the perfect place to place my pictures.

I intended to inform and attract a younger audience with something they are familiar with. At this day and age everyone is in touch with fashion, what looks good and what’s on trend. It has been brought to my attention that soft grunge, 80s/90s and festival clothing has been a recurring trend for a while now and this has been reinforced by celebrity endorsement, style icons, music videos, fashion lookbooks, blogs, Instagram, Tumblr you name it, it’s everywhere.

This seemed like a perfect idea and I was all set to start taking pictures. Unfortunately I came down with a chest infection and missed out on just over a week of lessons and didn’t have any time to organise models, outfits, locations etc. Because I am creative thinker I began to plan out an alternative on my first day back. I had decided to take pictures of a story. This story would illustrate a woman being followed and then killed by a guy in a mask. This idea derived from my love for horror films, so I had seen enough films to direct my own scene. I was much happier with this idea because it was something I was more comfortable with and it didn’t take a lot of time.

 I created a mask which was to mimic the scarecrow mask in the film The Strangers. This was surprisingly easier than I thought because I had never made my own mask before. I used Karina as the victim, Ilya as the boyfriend and Nathaniel as the killer. These pictures were taken in the garden and graveyard across the road from our college.  The equipment I used to photograph the pictures was a Canon 1100D. I used a shallow depth of field to isolate certain characters or background so that the attention was one something specific. This also gave it a scary vibe that you would get in a horror film by not knowing what was going on in every frame just as the character would feel. I took a series of pictures to build up to the point where the victim and villain are face to face. I made sure that it would be easy to recognize the images looked like a story without words. I then edited the pictures with the editing tools on Iphoto. All I really did was alter the filter a bit and put it in black and white.

I am very pleased with the result of my pictures and I'm glad that even though I was little behind towards the end, I still found away to do everything in such a short time and produce amazing pictures. If I could do it again I would have managed my time effectively and stick to one idea instead of being indecisive.