Final Evaluation

Throughout my whole project, I have looked into various photographers' work such as Richard Billingham, who presented harsh and contrasted streetlights on the roads of his childhood. Bettina von Zwehl, who presented vivid and personal portraits of women at vulnerable moments. Phillip Lorca Dicorcia, who presented theatrical portraits of people trying and struggling to live the American dream. Brassai, who presented deeply contrasted and suspenseful photos of the empty streets of Paris at its darkest hours. And finally, Victoria Siemer, who presented vibrant landscapes with forlorn pieces of text. I feel that the photographers Phillip Lorca Dicorcia and Victoria Siemer have influenced my final pieces' intentions the most. Dicorcia's work was theatrical and presented a deep complex story for each subject simply by just the positioning of artificial light and the surroundings around them. This made me want to create more of a story in my portraits and have the subject and surroundings create a mysterious story. Siemer's work was vibrant and mysterious with its abandoned landscapes and forlorn and emotional pieces of text. This influenced me to have my photos be more colourful and vivid in expression, while also conveying that emotion with surreal editing such as text. 

Through this research, I have gained new skills in location portraiture firstly, in previous projects my compositions for location portraiture was poor, but I feel in this project I have finally perfected my composition methods for location portraiture, as the portraits in my final shoots were dramatic and eyecatching, without any awkward positioning. I have also gained skill in flashgun techniques, as in my final shoots I learn to create vibrant and dramatic lighting effects by positioning the flashgun in different areas to the actual camera flash. I've learnt effective gel uses in photography, as in my final shoots I use a combination of gels to create vibrant and colourful atmospheres that create a better story of the character I presented. And finally, I learnt new editing methods where I create surreal presentations of glowing objects and text.

The intention for my final shoots was to present a character that is clearly bland and constantly feels unsatisfied with life, in their everyday life and attempt to contrast this miserable atmosphere and posing with the effect of colourful surroundings and surreal, exciting presentations of glowing objects and text. This was to further emphasize the characters forlorn emotions, presenting that even the colourful surroundings cannot satisfy this character. Overall, I feel I was very successful in presenting this in my final pieces. The character (me) appears consistently miserable, unsatisfied, and unimpressed by their surroundings, even though the surroundings are vibrant and exciting. The photos involving text presented the character's thoughts and emotions, which were all forlorn and lacked a substance as if the character felt disconnected to themselves. The one issue I found with my final pieces was the editing process of the glowing object photos. During the process, I struggled at points to perfect the appearance and I feel with further practice I could make the photo's cleaner in appearance, other than that I feel my photos met my exact intentions and were successful.