Demonstration of technical and visual skills

Materials

• As a thank-you I will be giving the sitters a print of their final image and a copy of the final file so they can use it for their social media accounts should they wish to.

Techniques

• The main technique I chose to experiment with in this assignment was using controlled lighting. There were two element to this, first lighting the sitters and second using a soft box to create a white background. My main source of information was watching videos on youtube and I think I partially suceeded in what I was trying to achieve. For most of the images I used a speedlight shot through a soft box at 45 degrees to the models and this does give some texture to the lighting, however, I feel that I did not adequately control the light from the rear soft box and so this has spilled onto the sitters. Using the flashes in manual mode was relatively straight-forward, however, I think this is a technique that requires practice, especially in terms of knowing where to position the lights in relation to the sitter.

Observational skills, visual awareness, design & compositional skills

• I found this assignment more challenging than assignment one, partly because I knew the models and partly because with flashes, stands and soft boxes, I thought they would assume I knew what I was doing and so it felt more pressured. In the end I recognise that I did not shoot enough images and that I made the fundamental mistake of not shooting any in portrait format; this was afterall a portrait assignment!
• I think the series would have been stronger if I had all the models posed looking straight at the camera. I found directing the models difficult and I think I should have shared with them an image of what I was trying to achieve.

Quality of outcome

Content, application of knowledge, presentation, discernment, conceptualisation, communication of ideas

• I think the five images I selected meet the assignment brief, work well as a set and as stand alone images. However, I have learned a lot from the assignment and if I were to do it again I think I would be able to produce a stronger series.
• I researched how to create images with a white background and feel I made a reasonable first attempt but reconise that the lighiting across the five images is not consistent and was not exactly as I intended.
• I am pleased with the presentation of the images and the conversion to black & white. I shot the images with the idea of converting to monochrme in mind and so this was not an afterthought and I am pleased with the conversion. I spent some time trying to come up with a conversion that I liked, including and then discarding using film presets, and then I applied the same settings to each image to produce a consistent series.
• I am not entirely sure that the series communicates my idea of capturing the these young women as they finish their university education and look to start their careers. As I wanted to shoot indoors I am not sure if I had shot against a different background whether that would have given contextual information that would have conveyed the idea so in the end I was happy with the decision to shoot against a plain backround.

Demonstration of creativity

Imagination, experimentation & invention

• The fact that I took as my start point images shot by famous photographers demonstrates that the images are not inventive, however, I did experiment with using lighting and trying to create a plain background, something that I had not done before. I enjoyed trying to create controlled lighting and it is somehting I hope to do more of in future.

Context

Reflection, research (learning logs)

• I have not spent as much time on my learning log as I need to and this is something I am aiming to address in the coming weeks.