For today's post, I thought I'd share with you my unit 3 A Level Photography and the process behind it. The exam board for photography (and all of the art department i.e. graphics, textiles, art etc) at my college was AQA. I know that a lot of photography students work from sketchbooks, however my teacher preferred us all to use powerpoint since it was an easier way to go back and change some of our project at a later date, which would have been virtually imppossible to do if we had used sketchbooks. One out of the four photography teachers at my college made his class use sketchbooks which I'll admit, did look a lot of fun and way more creative, but as my own teacher pointed out, it's about the photographs, not about doodling in an art sketchbook or tea staining the pages since that wouldn't get you any marks. For each shoot we did, we had to have an inspiration page, followed by planning for the shoot (if required), the shoot itself (made into contact sheets on photoshop), selected imagery (our favourite photographs from the shoot), a shoot evaluation, refinements (if necessary) and optionally a cross contextualisation page.
Like most photography students I predictably began obsessing over slow shutter speeds and light drawings (I know, how original) because I thought they were so cool/creative and I had never experimented with anything like it before. So my project started with placing the camera on the floor with the lens facing up in a dark room and moving my cat's red laser toy as well as a torch above the camera to create the most random lines and shapes. Since these first few shoots where I did this were crap, I won't bother to show you the finished photographs and instead will skip to shoots 3 and 4. I began to think about other ways to experiment with slow shutter speeds and eventually decided on forcing my parents and friends to hold fairy lights like a skipping rope and swing them round. I came up with this idea by myself (rather than my teacher suggesting it or copying the method directly from an inspirational photographer) so was really pleased with what I managed to produce.
For my final piece I used photoshop to make each image square in dimensions and then combined 3 of my favourite photographs together to make a tryptic. I found that arranging each individual photograph in such a formation reminded me of planets, due to the out-of-this-world colours, the circular shape and the contrast of the dark background.
UNIT 3
Like most photography students I predictably began obsessing over slow shutter speeds and light drawings (I know, how original) because I thought they were so cool/creative and I had never experimented with anything like it before. So my project started with placing the camera on the floor with the lens facing up in a dark room and moving my cat's red laser toy as well as a torch above the camera to create the most random lines and shapes. Since these first few shoots where I did this were crap, I won't bother to show you the finished photographs and instead will skip to shoots 3 and 4. I began to think about other ways to experiment with slow shutter speeds and eventually decided on forcing my parents and friends to hold fairy lights like a skipping rope and swing them round. I came up with this idea by myself (rather than my teacher suggesting it or copying the method directly from an inspirational photographer) so was really pleased with what I managed to produce.
This eventually led to my teacher suggesting I explore the idea of circles and colour, by taking inspiration from Gary Fabian Miller who created 'camera-less photography' in the darkroom. I preceded to create photograms in the darkroom using circular objects such as glass vases, petri dishes and CD discs. During this time I worked with purposeful paper fogging and selective development however I wasn't enjoying this process and so decided to photograph coloured glass balls sat on a lightbox in the studio. During around this time was when my memory stick corrupted and I lost most of my photographs apart from my contact sheets for the shoot. After this, I think I spent about 2-3 weeks procrastinating in class (without my teacher noticing and telling me off...how did I manage this?!) because I didn't know which direction to head in and lost all motivation for my project. Eventually, I was "working" in my photography room during a free and spontaneously put an acetate sheet down on a lightbox and mixed washing up liquid with food colouring which I shot using a macro lens which captured the circular, colourful bubbles.
I was inspired by Janet Water's photography in which she used acrylic paint and hair gel with a macro lens. So for shoot 7 and 8 I bought coloured hair gel from a supermarket and used the acrylic paint from the art department. I mixed the two together to create something similar to her work.
For my final shoot, my teacher asked me to come in Monday morning in my free since he had an idea for me. Shoot 9 involved a laptop screen being flat on the floor with my images from shoot 8 loaded on the screen and a clear, plastic cup on filled with hair gel. I shot from an overhead angle and used a tripod to avoid camera shake. Using a plastic cup on a laptop screen produced an interesting effect which you can see for yourself below.
Since our art department at college had a summer art exhibition at the end of the year, we also had to decide how we wanted to present our final pieces. I decided to frame my final piece with a custom made, plain, silver frame (which cost a ridiculous amount of money as I had to get it ASAP and it was such an odd size) to compliment the cool tones.
For unit 3, I got 90/100 UMS points which got me an A for this one unit and really helped me to get an overall grade in photography of A*. I'm really proud of myself since I did find this unit hard in terms of my motivation. I guess you could say I had a bit of a photographer's block half way through.
I'm hoping to have another post up shortly (similar to this one) about the process behind my unit 4 work which I'm really excited to share with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment