The first stage of this assignment was to research about some photography artists, we was given a list of 7 to choose from so I managed to research about them all, getting some, really interesting information about the artists life, work, hobbies and background information in general. I wrote about these on my blog and then included two pictures of each of the artist’s work; to show examples of the photos they produced. When researching some of the artists, I found I couldn’t write much as I didn’t find much information about them and their work. I also wrote a statement on intent which explained what I chose to dress up as for my alter ego photo shoot.
The next part of this assignment was doing a photo shoot dressed as my alter ego. I chose to do a lady bird, as I already had the things and so it wouldn’t mean me having to spend a lot of time and money looking for something else to dress up as. When taking my pictures I think my photo shoot went really well as I got a lot of shots which were clear and high quality, I also got a lot of pictures that I could work with when using Photoshop to edit them. However when taking my pictures I had to make sure there was the correct lighting being used and the camera was on the right settings.
For my photo shoot I used the flash and the settings were on auto making it easier to take pictures, the reason why I had the setting on auto was so I could get the right shots I wanted. I had to use a white background when taking my photos as well, as I was cutting my self out and putting myself into different backgrounds/locations. I then chose two photos from my photo shoot and four different backgrounds/locations to put myself into, the first one was in a woods as ladybirds are creatures that like wood, leaves and plants etc. When cutting out my image I did have some difficulties with it when using the quick select tool because the colour of my skin tone and the background was both light so, I ended up using the magic cut tool to draw line around myself getting rid of the background. This was so I could use a different background image. The second background I used was a garden; I again cut my self out of the picture and pasted myself onto the chosen background image. Although It did take a while to draw a line around my self using the magic tool as I had to get rid of all the white background and have a neat outline so it didn’t look to disordered when I put it on my chosen backgrounds. The next background image I chose was to put myself in a picture with a plant behind me making the plant/flowers black and white and leaving myself in colour. The last picture I chose to put myself in the fake windows with an arch walkway at the botanical gardens, I managed to get the cropped picture of myself standing up so it looks like I was actually at the place.
After researching artists, writing about my statement of intent and placing my photo shoot image in my two different chosen locations, I then chose 4 of my photo shoot images which were my best ones, and uploaded them to my blog to analyse them. When analysing my pictures I talked about what I liked about them, the camera settings and the lighting control. I wrote about the lighting control as sometimes I had to re-take the shots. This was because the lighting affected the shutter speed on the camera when taking the picture so the picture came out blurry. I also wrote about the technical research which included: what camera I used, the lighting that was used, what type of background was used to take the 4 photos, and finally the process I went through to take the pictures.
If I was to take my pictures again I think I would go more adventurous and think about my alter ego more instead of rushing into it, even though I do like the photo’s I have taken I do think I could of done better. All in all I am happy with the work I have produced and don’t think I could improve the artist research as I just researched about them and their work, and put it in my own words, I then included some examples of their work that caught my eye.
I also don’t think I could improve my edits because I managed to cut out myself the way I wanted it to go and if it didn’t look right the first time I would use the magic cut tool again and cut out more of the background to get a neat outline, I was also happy with the locations I chose and managed to find a high resolution picture which made the edit look even enhanced. In the end I used 2 different pictures from the photo shoot and put myself in 4 different location/ backgrounds. The only reason I had to use background pictures that I had taken was because I was using the apple mac computer and the fire fox wouldn’t open which was a big pain, but I still managed to create my photos because I luckily had ones that I’d taken for my last assignment.
Over all I think all of the steps of work I done went well because I thought about what I was going to dress up as for the photo shoot. Then I managed to find some artist research that gave me an idea of the different types of photography artists out there. My statement of intent, the photo shoot and talking about the 4 different images taken in my photo shoot all went well, as well.
