A couple of months ago I wrote a post about my photography work from unit 3 of my A Levels. If you want to go and read that post with a bit more background information on my course etc, then you can click here.  Today, I'm finally getting round to showing you the rest of the work that I produced in my final year at college in unit 4.

The exam board gave us a few techniques and specifications about the starting points of our project. The only ones that I can remember were colour, multiple images and portraits I believe (or maybe even distortion). I began to look at typologies which are a type of multiple images (here are a few examples 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 ) and began to take dozens of photographs of car wheels, pennies (particularly how they got dirtier as they got older) and different colours of sweets. I had a really slow start to this unit and wasn't really feeling happy with what I was producing, so naturally, I returned to the studio where I felt more comfortable. My teacher actually found this on Pinterest and suggested I give it a go. 

SHOOT 5
This technique is called toast art. You basically cut out shapes in tin foil, position it over bread and then leave it in the grill for a few minutes for it to burn/toast. I made various letters with the intention of spelling words like the one above, as well as 'burn' and 'sun burn' which I shot in the studio against different colours of paper like my inspirational photograph. 

SHOOT 6
I developed this idea a little further by creating more letters so that I could spell out more words. In the studio I began manipulating the words I was making by physically taking a bite out of the toast. 
When I was refining my work, I discovered that I could spell 'red' but for some reason I decided to use the green background. This random idea got me thinking about the idea of irony and playing around with viewers expectations.

SHOOT 8
I was inspired by this photograph on pinterest as part of Matt Lain and Toni Caroline's 'biscuit project'. I liked the idea of playing around with food again and also manipulating familiar objects with colour, so my lovely friend, Pippa and I began the lesson by painting custard creams (aka the best biscuit ever). I really liked the idea of painting them pastel colours (pastel pink, blue and purple) that would also match the coloured paper I'd shoot them against. 

SHOOT 9 (FINAL SHOOT)
I stumbled across this image on Pinterest (Pinterest is amazing for inspiration btw) and although I thought it was badly photographed, I loved how they'd used a collection of familiar objects and manipulated the colour of them. I decided I wanted to do something similar and eventually remembered the phrase 'eat your greens'. I thought it would look so awesome and ironic to have unhealthy food painted green. With this in mind, I bought some unhealthy food with the most interesting and distinguishable shapes: a doughnut, a chocolate bar, Oreos, chips and a burger. I then spent the evening in my garden spray painting the food green. I went into college the next day and positioned the food against a white canvas. In my refinements I decided to add the phrase 'eat your greens' onto the actual photograph. My teacher helped me to get rid of the slight yellow tone to the photograph to make the background seem like a truer white. And there you have it...my final piece:
For unit 4 I achieved full marks which I'm still struggling to believe! I'm really happy with this unit because I successfully created both a conceptual and a technical piece of work, so all of my hard work definitely paid off. 

Until next time,
Sophie