Evaluation

Evaluation

From the beginning to the end I struggled to relate to the portraiture task.  Portraiture was always something I had steered away from when I was doing my A-level, and now the choice was taken away, I knew I lacked studio skills and lighting techniques. I think I was a bit intimidated as well by the work of photographers like Martin Schoeller because I wouldn’t have known where to start in trying to recreate his work.

I was quite surprised when it came to my first shoot because I didn’t feel nervous at all which I put down to the calm atmosphere we had in the studio at the time.  I was slightly anxious prior to this as we were introduced to a new camera the day before which was difficult to use and I didn’t want that to limit the outcome of the shoot, therefore damaging my grade. From a technical point of view I think this was one of the most difficult things in the section of the course, alongside using Light Room which I find challenging. Its editing tools were great but I didn’t really know why it was so complicated to access my edited light room files in Photoshop when they are both made by adobe or just to file and save my pictures as TIFFs or JPEGs so I could view them on my computer at home.

After receiving the results of my last module I became a lot more confident with my research, and again that’s helped me a lot to decide what aspect of portraiture I want to explore, in this case it was lighting and in particular Rembrandt lighting.

My most successful shoot was my second because I had a plan of what I wanted to do and I think I enjoyed it more than the first because I could have a laugh with my brother at the same time and I think this  showed in the photographs.

If I was to do this project again I would spend a lot more time in the studio because with photography, practice makes perfect. I would also like to try and shoot in a similar style to Malick Sidibe because he really has a unique look to his photos and it seems to be a light hearted affaire when he’s in the studio, and with his models which makes it easy for everyone. I would also spend more time watching videos on how to operate Light Room properly because that was one of the things that annoyed me the most. To summarise I think it went ok and a good learning experience but portraiture isn’t something I am confident with at this stage.