Personal Philosophies: project 1 so far

So this module is P7. I actually started it before Easter but as we're just over half way through now (or we where when I started writing this post!) I thought I'd give you all a peak at my progress so far. 

For this module we have to come up with two different projects that play to our strengths as well a making a Personal Development plan (eugh!) This is my first project idea and it's developing quite nicely. I won't say too much about my second project as it's been a bit of a disaster so far and I've had to come up with another idea so it's still in it's early stages.

Anyway, back to this project. I have been inspired by silhouettes and shadow theatre as a traditional way of telling stories to make a piece about my Nanna. As I'm sure you can imagine it was an extremely sad time for my whole family when she passed away and so it's been so nice to be able to think back and remember some of the things we did together and incorporate them into my photographic practice.

P6 part 2, shoot 3

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.

P6 part 2, shoot 2

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.

P6 part 2, shoot 1

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.