At the start of the year I wasn’t quite sure what photography
was going to be like, what kind of challenges it was going to bring me or how I was going to cope with doing the subject as an a level. However a short way into the course my view of photography had completely changed. Before I started the course I had always enjoyed taking pictures but didn’t really know why. After a few months this became clear to me, as photography became something bigger in my life, I prioritised more time to it and took it more seriously.
People always ask me when I say I do photography, “isn’t it just taking pictures?” and I think this is where I have come along in my photography and realised that its not just taking pictures, its often more to do with the concepts and ideas behind the photos, the groundwork done before to create such an effective photo or set of photos. However I think the strongest part of my photography would be the composition side of taking photos, which leads one of my interests being landscapes. An artist who I researched during my coursework and looked at as a group during the year was Ansell Adams. His pictures gave me the determination to visit many different locations to shoot in different conditions for my coursework.
“ At one with power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work.”
An artist who has more recently inspired me would be the work of Slinkachu, in his project, ‘little people – a tiny street art project, little hand painted people left in London to fend for themselves. It involves him using miniature model train set characters, placing them in an everyday scenario or area and making them look life like through the eye of a camera lens. This appeals to me, as it is creative and fun to look out, I like it because it is both a street art installation project and a photography project. In some of my recent work I have tried to create my own sense of slinkachu’s work and tried to make it even more playful, I used small war hammer figures and in one instance photographed them in the foreground with a dog in the background, playing with the idea that they were fighting the dog where actually they were extremely small compared to the dog.
I feel my weaknesses in photography would mainly be the manipulating side of images, using adobe Photoshop, I feel that if I can just learn the basics of it then I will be able to develop my skills more on it by doing experiments and trying the different tools out. I also feel that my other weakness is that I need pushing with creativity, sometimes I struggle with a creative idea but once I am pushed in the right direction I then find it easier and can develop my idea more. I look at the photography course as a way of me being helped to improve my photography in a high enough standard which will hopefully enable me to carry it on further into the future, I also feel that it will give me the right knowledge and maturity to be able to go to university.
My targets for next year would be to try and be more independent with my creativity, and try a lot more creative experiments whether they work out or not, also to read more and gain the knowledge to be able to talk about my photos in more depth.
I decided that i wanted to do some experiments using a fish eye camera as i liked the different perspective from which the images are seen through the lens. The first thing that came to mind was photographing objects but through the fish eye lens it isolates them making it more visually pleasing.
