Creative Media BTEC: July 2016

Problems

During this assignment, I came across a number of issues that affected my overall assignment. The fact is that because I was on work experience for an entire week and had to focus on health and social care. The time that I had for this assignment was cut in half and due to other plans, I was left with three days to plan and administer a photo-shoot.

I also failed to properly comprehend the assignment and had to redo parts of it, in order to match the brief and I was not completely sure if my photo-shoot was in line with what the assignment was asking and therefore I had to alter my ideas, alter the plan until I picked up an idea that fit the brief.

Good Elements/Constructive Criticism

What went well in the planning was that due to the idea of photographing family, I had models at my disposable and everyone in the family happily helped me with my assignment as you can see in the final photos.

The overall feedback was amazing! However, I gained a lot of constructive criticism for the pictures that I took. Such as, The way I set out the pictures. The main criticism I received was that the printing quality was terrible.
I now know that next time I shouldn’t print my photo’s but show them electronically.
The actual models themselves were positively received, however some of the viewers didn’t see the idea behind individuality because some family members have the same facial expression.
I know for the future, to use more direction with the models to achieve a result that screams the message of the photos, loud and clear.

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I also believe that the effectiveness of my photo-shoot reflected on the feedback that I received.
In the photo-shoot, my main intention was to give off the idea that everyone has personality and that everyone is different, despite the fact that we're all in the same family. We all have different personality's. I wanted the viewers of the photo shoot to feel happy and I wanted to get the idea across how everyone is happy in the photo's by just being themselves. I wanted the viewers to feel that they understood the person and their person by studying the photo I took of them being caught in the moment

Below: My Younger Sister caught in the moment while just "dancing to music" as that is part of her personality.

Left: My Mother, who loves to laugh, smiling.

Technical Aspects

The camera that I used was incredible (Canon EOS 1200D) and really captured the photos in focus for each picture. to my knowledge, no pictures came out blurry from camera use. To meet the assignment brief, I changed the focal length, Aperture and the shutter speed manually. In order to see how these would impact on the final picture. In the future, I should read about how these can actually impact the image after capturing it and set them accordingly rather than at random.

As seen in my previous blog post, one family member had her eyes changed from blue to brown because of how low the shutter speed was compared to the aperture. I put this in the final photo’s in order to show her personality despite this change. I also experienced shooting at different angles in order to see how this would benefit the photo by the end result. Such as a close up and then an extreme close up of the eyes and mouths.

Effectiveness of My Planning and Link to Contemporary Practice

Overall, the fact is that my planning wasn’t as effective as it could have been. Because of the short time span, I changed my ideas quite a lot and therefore had to keep changing my plan. Some things that I did in the photo shoot, I did not write up in my plan as they were last minute decisions and I had limited time and funds to do the photo-shoot by that time.

Some things that I did not put in my final plan but did in the photo-shoot were, creating a collage in the background of family photos, then posing and being themselves in front of that collage specifically, in order to get the idea that I was documenting family rather than just random people. In order to make it extremely clear that the idea was to document my family.

On the left: a sample of the photo's extracted from the Orange is the New Black (OITNB) opening sequence - Which were captured and designed by Thomas Cobb group
On the Right: My own photo's where i attempt to replicate the same style of photo as the ones on the left. with them members of my family.

In this evaluation, I have chosen to use the photo's that I captured of my sister, Hadassah. I will critically evaluate and compare against the photo's from OITNB as seen above.

My photo-shoot was to replicate the same idea of the OITNB theme song and relate it to my own life. If you look at the Opening sequence, it is a sequence of different faces, specifically focusing on the eyes and the mouth of many different women who were formally incarcerated (which is the theme of the show) the idea is to tell the audience that each of the women in the photo have their own story and why they were sent to prison. No two stories are the same.

Here is the video below:

I wanted to take this idea and put it in the context of my family, That although we all look alike. No two people are the same. You can see in the photo's above how I tried to capture at the same angle when I took a photo of my family's eyes and mouth.

With the eyes, a positive is that in the photo above I really captured the colour of my sister's eyes which come across as a piercing blue and when you look at the photo, you can see the personality through her eyes such as fact that you can see that she's staring straight into the camera, her eyes can be seen as being youthful and with hope in them. As well as the fact that she's git clear skin, freckles and mascara on. However, I can see a negative of this image is the fact that I used too much focal zoom, and I cut out the bottom of her nose, which most of the pictures in theme song do have, as well as including more of her cheeks. Furthermore, Had I zoomed out more on the eyes I believe tat the viewers can see more personality from the model through her nose shape/size.

With the mouth, in my opinion I think I copied it quite accurately as i made sure to focus specifically on the lips on the photo and apply flash directly to that element of her face. I took this picture up close as well instead of using Facial zoom as well of putting the camera mode on "portrait" so that I could focus on her lips and blur out the background such as her hair and neck. However unlike the photo of the models "eyes" I accurately managed to add in the tip of the nose and good portion of her cheeks, however you can clearly see that in this photo as well I shouldn't have zoomed in as much,
and clearly you see that the photo of her lips would have been more effective with darker lighting in the room so that it could it would have been more effective if I had used darker lighting in the room, therefore, when I had used the flash the picture of the lips would be brighter, emphasises and had more attention drawn to it.