Final images

I have decided on these to be my final images because I believe they are aesthetically pleasing and they really represent the points I make in my evaluation.

Evaluation

Although there wasn't a huge amount of images i believe this brief went well. I managed to get a decent amount of images and the images I needed. I really like some of the images especially the ones from the woods with the off camera flash behind the model. I liked this technique because it almost masked the individual person creating a sense of anonymity.

Application of Images

For these images I believe that they could be used for a variant of applications, for example using them for a movie poster or a sci-fi film. I think this because they have an eerie atmosphere to some of the images with the low-key atmosphere with the main subject highlighted but at the same time the main points of the subject are obstructed by shadows. There is also a sense of being within a transition of teenage into adulthood, having certain responsibilities forced upon you while still wanting to be a teen, acting like one and having minimal responsibilities and having a general care free attitude towards life. These images display the obstruction to happiness that adulthood presents upon teenagers "growing up". Due of the lighting there is a sense of travel and transformation into the process of maturing and growing up. It's a metaphor for this sense of growing out of the acceptable behavior for a teen and into more appropriate behavior and attitude for adult life.

I believe my work is similar to that of Gregory Crewdson in that aesthetically they do like quite similar with the lowkey environment with artificial lighting to help illuminate the subject. The gallery goes on to say: "with little reference to prior events or what may follow. The artist has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time" this means that the images aren't a series of part of a bigger picture, they are a still moment from an event in time.

I found this image while searching through Greg's Artists and believed this was very similar in terms of subject, lighting and even composition.

I believe this shoot would have gone a lot better, the sky was fairly interesting with nice cloud shapes, the location was nice and the lighting was quite good. The only problem with this shoot is that the wind really picked up to the point where it was actually blowing the speedlight over. This also meant the wind was right in the subjects face and making it difficult and uncomfortable for her.

Exhibition Poster Evaluations.

This is quite a strange format for a poster, I believe it's a secondary poster for the exhibition as there isn't a location on the poster and it's a square format, most posters keep to an A4/3/2 size ratio. I think the poster is very interesting due to this reason. The portrait is very interesting and the typography is also interesting. The way they have cut off the bottom of the '13' and it adds another interesting and eye catching element to the poster. They have used a basic easily readable font in a nice format and size.

In this poster it is quite similar to the one above, it is in a standard format and ratio with easily legible text and fonts, I assume this poster is a lot larger due to the smaller text in the corner. The actual portrait is interesting too, it has an effect on the image that looks almost HDR. There's a slight outer shadow to the whole portrait which makes it look almost 3 dimensional to the plain grey background. The whole theme of the poster matches the exhibition style. The simple colours and sophisticated poster design reflects the type of exhibition. This isn't going to be an entertaining fun looking exhibition it is going to give you an interesting and enlightening insight into The Queens art and image.

Posters

With this poster I decided to do something a little different with the text styles. I wanted to use a text colour that would really stand out from the background so I used a colour that contrasts green in the image and also use a warmer colour that would contrast the cool feel to the image. I didnt use as bright an orange because the background that it is placed over is quite highlighted from the flash.

Very similar to above with this format, again using an orange coloured font for the poster. I wanted to keep all the font style to a sans serif format as I think it looks cleaner for posters and can be more legible at smaller font sizes like the name list at the bottom. Also for web use/computer use sans serif fonts work better with the pixels on screen. The only other difference with this and the other posters when it comes to text is I inverted the Photographers Gallery logo to make it pop out more.

 I stitched two photographs together in photoshop and used a very soft eraser to remove the harsh edges of the images so they blended together a little more.

I then used the text tool and exploring with different fonts and sizes decided on this format. This format works well with all of the posters when it comes to names and location and date.

As part of the poster designs we had to include 'The photographers Gallery' logo in the poster so I pulled the image of google and used the colour select feature in photoshop to remove the background of the image. I could of course have used a PNG which wouldn't have had a background but I couldn't find one of high enough quality.

Also with this poster I used the top image purposely because of the leading lines, the whole poster is basically an arrow pointing towards the tittle of the exhibition with the tree's leading up towards the shadow arrow on the top image.

Exploring photographers.

Micheal Wolf

Wolf decided for one of his projects to use Google Street View as his medium of work. He explored Google Street View with a camera snapping at the screen when he saw something that intrigued him.

Although he doesn't technically take any of the images he frames and cropped the images himself to isolate a certain subject. I really like his work because its unique, he's using a website that's used mainly for navigation and expressing it in a artistic way. He's selecting individual landscapes and subjects and isolating them away from everything else like a photographer would do. He's selecting moments that you don't see much. These images are from his photographing series "A series of unfortunate events" He's named this because I think he has found theses images that the subjects wouldn't want to be captured in or something that just doesn't happen all that often, especially not on camera; especially not Google Street View.


Todd Hido

Todd often took landscapes out of his car, I think he did this to get a perspective he was getting at that exact moment while he was driving.

As shown in the images there's a hazy slightly dirty layer over the image. This is just from his car window. You can see in the middle image that there's water on the glass so there's these spots of distortion in the frame and I think it looks really good and really works with the mood of the image. You can see in the image just above that he has taken it through his windscreen, you can see the rearview mirror and the sun visor in the top.


Thomas Albdorf

Thomas combined still life and landscape by placing items within the landscape.

I really enjoy his work, it adds another level to these beautiful sceneries by adding a totally contrasting subject. To do some of his work he either has the cube on the stand or by hanging sheets of acetate sheets with something printed or painted on them on string tied to the sheets. It makes the landscapes a lot more interesting and allows the image to really stand out from any particular landscapes and you're drawn towards these sets of images because you wonder what is going on within the image.

Landscapes

Landscape photography is taking images (generally a wide angle shot) of fr example the countryside, landscapes you are supposed to be able to see everything with a relatively equal horizon. This can be twisted and changed per subject or even photograph. For example cityscapes are similar to landscapes but instead of a row of fields it's a city's skyline or horizon.
This is your very typical cliché landscape

Often quite HDR, equal landscape and skyline.











Then there are cityscapes or urban landscapes

These often break the typical rules of landscape because there's a lot more going on in citys, a lot of urban landscapes are often shot in the street on ground level.








The things to consider when shooting landscape is the different camera options and set ups. For shooting a normal landscape during the day you're best of shooting low iso so you don't get noise from your darker tones and mid range aperture like f11 to get a lot more in focus and it's what's called the 'sweet spot' of lenses where all of the image is at it's sharpest. You roughly want to stick to the Rule Of Thirds grid depending what you're shooting. If you're shooting the sky mainly you'll want the sky to take up the top two thirds whereas if you're shooting the actual land you'll want to frame the ground within the bottom two thirds or roughly along the centre line.

You can again break these, if you're doing landscapes by the sea you can get some very nice effects by using slow shutter speeds on a tripod to get the sea to look like it has a glassy effect.

This is an example of slow shutter speeds for seascapes.











Slow shutters also work quite well with night cityscapes too although for both these slow shutter techniques

People often shoot landscapes on a 5 x 4 format camera. This means that the film negative is huge and you can get phenominal amounts of detail

Still life examples

Cristina Ara

Cristina Ara does still life photography featuring everyday quite boring things, she ads a slightly arty effect to the images by adding a square or a rectangle with a slightly different hue or colour balance. Usually one of the primary or secondary colours. I really like this work because it's really minimal and simple but I believe they're quite interesting pieces.

Here is an image inspired by Cristina Ara

How I did this was by selecting a square and centring it. I changed the colour by using the Colour Balance adjustment layer and moving the slider all the way to the red spectrum and the rest to the opposite.

Generating Ideas