While the images I took in the second shoot were much better than shoot 1 in terms of quality, the portrayal of my concept is somewhat lacking. I had discussion with another lecturer and we came up with a solution that lies in the middle of my 2 previous shoots which was to shoot at my house and arrange the characters look through photo albums. At this point in the module I was a week away from the deadline and extremely pressed for time and so I wasn't able to go home and collect family albums and we have rather too many for my mum to send to me. In the end I made do with making my own from images that my mum emailed to me.
So this is the final outcome, I'm not crazy about it to be honest. Shooting against the radiator was not the vision I originally had, ideally the background would have been plain but the shelf I wanted to use as my stage wasn't wide enough to support the book once opened so in the end I had to use my desk. I feel that with this shoot I'm closer to achieving what I imagined this piece to be but it's still not quite there. I think that if maybe I'd thought of this idea a week earlier I would have been able to complete this project to the standard I wanted to.
After having a tutorial and discussing my work from my previous shoot with one of my lecturers I decided to try and simplify my approach, similar to what I did for the first part of the module. So I booked a slot in the studio and did another shoot and experimented with how the characters might interact with their own books.
For the second part of P6 I wanted to create a piece about the books I loved as a child. Reading is one of my favourite past times and if it wasn't for these fantastic characters and the authors that bought them to life I wouldn't be such a keen reader now. So, with the idea that these books still have an influence over my life now that I'm 20 I set about creating images that bought the main characters into my world.
I picked 6 characters from 6 different books and scanned pretty much every illustrations I which I then printed and cut out (that was a task and a half!).
This was my first shoot, I photographed the locations separately and re photographed them as a background image while holding the cut out character in front. The quality isn't great but they are only test shots. Feedback on these was mixed, one lecturer liked then and another wasn't too keen. Personally, I think they have potential if the background image was better quality.
The P6 module is split into two assignments and for this first one I have had to create a series of 5 still life images in the studio.
I was stuck for what to do for quite a while but eventually came up with the idea of photographing objects from a birds eye view so that the viewer has to guess what they are. The objects I have picked all have some kind of personal significance to me and in the final piece the images are accompanied by a card of hand written text explaining why.
I found working with the white background a challenge as it was difficult to get the tone consistent over the different shoots.
When I was deciding on the final presentation and positioning of the text I considered scanning the index cards and layering them using Photoshop, but I think including the actual card gives the work back some substance as it all just seemed too flat otherwise.
This brief has actually been very exiting as I learnt how to use a Phase 1 digital back with a Hasselblad camera. I really like this equipment because it makes you take as much care as if you're using film but the images are digital. And the quality is amazing!
