Overall Evaluation

My work has been very inspired by my research. I think the most influential artist that I researched has been Rut Blees Luxemburg. She inspired many landscape and location pictures I took. Also she inspired the way I edited them, this is because of her very distinct style, and the way she captures more rustic, abandoned and 'street' landscapes, and the way she emphasises the dark tones to create quite a dark and mysterious, almost scary atmosphere. Many of my location and landscape pictures that I took when we went to London to take pictures, were inspired by her. As I wanted to focus less on capturing the London that is very famous, the London everyone knows and loves, but more the abandoned and less looked after areas, as we passed through many places like this. Here are some examples of my pictures from these shoots that were the most inspired by her:

Irving Penn has also inspired my portraits, especially the close up, low key lighting ones. Researching him, gave me the inspiration to take portraits with over powering use of negative space, and using close ups and tonal contrast to emphasise contours and facial features. His work on Miles Davis especially inspired this.

In terms of technicalities, I think I have massively improved, this is because of the way I knew nothing about camera settings, or setting up in the studio, e.g. tripods, but now I am able to understand how different camera settings allow for different sorts of pictures, and they need to be changed depending on what kind of picture you want to achieve. I think our lessons, and researching depth of field, helped me understand these much more. From that point on, I found myself focusing on shallow or deep depth of field in a lot of my shoots, as I realised how much of a difference it makes, and how it can even change the meaning and connotations of a picture. I also learnt many skills with photoshop, e.g composite images, I liked doing this as I think it is a very creative technique, however I did not produce any further shoots on this idea as I found it hard to come up with ideas that had a lot of meaning.

I have also experimented a lot with computer experiments in photoshop, in many of my shoots I have edited and manipulated my pictures to make them more creative, and to help build desired connotations. I now think editing pictures is crucial, even if I am just slightly changing the levels and curves of the picture, this is because it makes for a more professional looking shoot, and it enhances the good elements of the picture. I experimented further in a post I labelled 'Computer Experiments and another one named 'Physical Experiments'.

All of these techniques have really helped me to improve my photography skills in general. I think this obvious when looking at my first few shoots, in the formal elements, and how my pictures have improved so much when doing the portraiture and landscape pictures. I think my best shoot was the landscape and location shoot that I did when we went on a class trip. I think this was because before this, we were quite limited to shooting in college and the local area, and this isn't always interesting enough, and when going on this shoot, I got some of my best pictures.
This has helped me see that my work has been heading in a landscape direction. Also my landscape portrait pictures, in my own opinion, worked better than my studio portrait pictures. Therefore I think this idea was developed when going on the London trip, and this is the idea that has been most successful. I like these sort of pictures, and I enjoyed researching many photographers who took these kind of pictures, as I always like how there is so much meaning behind them, it is all very genuine photography. I also like the realism of these photos, there has been no artificial set ups, its all very down to earth. I saw these elements a lot in Alex Soth's work which I explained in my trip report. In addition, I have also found the way I edit my pictures to follow a similar path, of brining out the dark tones and shadows to make quite a rustic and mysterious atmosphere. I like the way these pictures have turned out so I kept doing, I think it makes the whole mood and connotations of a picture, completely darker and negative, and I think that transition is quite interesting.

On the other hand, there have been elements of my work that have not turned out so well. I think the composite images I did looked very fake and artificial, and just didn't look right at all, and when researching composite artists and producing an image bank, I found that many photographers create very abstract composite pictures, but they still looked very life like, they manages to make an unrealistic picture, very life like. And this is where I failed, and doe that reason, I didn't develop this idea or expand on it. I also think a few of my shoots on the formal elements that we did at the start of the year, were did not turn out so well, I think some of them didn't look very professional, and they looked a bit pointless, lacking any meaning or connotations, but I feel like that was because it was at the start of the year so I was experimenting with different kinds of photos, as I wasn't very familiar with photography before this year. But I feel like these skills that I lacked, I improved on a lot, creating pictures that had a lot more of a meaning behind them.