Over the past 2 and a half years I have experimented with various different things like different styles and ways of editing, taking pictures, playing with photography and generally producing work. First we had to do a series of experiments involving different types of photography including cyanotypes, photograms and pinhole cameras, these were small projects that required the teacher to show us how to do, these almost set us up for later in the course when we start to develop our own work, almost like training. After the small projects, we move onto our personal projects which is where we have t do projects as a class however they are much more our own and what we want them to be, you can do what you want and eventually, you start to develop your own style of working. My style of photography is taking pictures from a ground level point of view, what an ant might see or a piece of rubbish, most of the time you see pictures from a human level, because a human is taking it, to sum up, my style of photography, I might call it unusual angles or low angles. In total, we did 4 personal projects, edges, self-portraits, abstraction and architecture. Edges I found to be a starting point of many techniques I still use today, low angles, distorting images and making them look different either practically or through editing. In self-portraits, I learnt that I should try my best to adapt my way of doing photography into things that I even don't like, even though it can be difficult. In abstraction, this is where I really solidified my techniques and style and actually knew what I liked doing and how I liked doing it. Architecture is my most recent project and I think that this project has been the easiest one because I one, had a topic that really interested me and two, I knew what I was doing. My best two projects were abstraction and architecture.
Abstraction was easier than all the previous because by the end of the project I had everything set in stone about the way that I like to do photography and knew what I was doing, it also felt a lot more free, because it wasn't as restricted as everything before which is one of my favourite parts about abstraction, nothing has to really make sense visually. my style of abstract photography I would describe as being very close to the subject and also very low, the focus of my photographs either started low or were just very low to the ground. throughout the project I did many case studies on artists and photographs, two that I did on Akihiko Myoshi and Bill Armstrong, these two photographers work highly influenced my work and I, in fact, did my final piece influenced by their work, their work is about things like disruption, for example Bill Armstrong makes unfocused, extremely vibrant pictures and sometimes even paints colour onto them, Akihiko Miyoshi has done things like putting colourfull tape over his camera lens and taking a picture, this creates the effect of a filter when its just the tape. From those two artists, I learnt a lot about disruption of images which I still really like to do today however in abstraction as a whole the main thing that I learnt would probably be how to make images my own whilst also taking inspiration from other photographers who do similar things that I am interested in.
architecture I found to be one of my favourites because when I take pictures they are either very close or low to the ground and it is easy to see what is in frame, when I found out that we could choose whatever topic we wanted out of the selection my first thought was definitely architecture because I couldn't think of anything better to take pictures from a low point of view than a building. I started off by just doing some case studies into artists and images that they took, one artist that took my eye was Berenice Abbott she was popular from the 1930s-60s and she used to have old black and white cameras to take pictures on and used to sometimes take pictures of buildings either from the top or from a human point of view, I started off abstraction by studying her and taking pictures in black and white then editing them to look like hers. But then I realised that I should really just leave that as a case study and I realised that I had gone away from my own style and tried to be like hers, so I started taking these pictures that were of buildings and constructions however they were once again from a low point of view and this time I decided to experiment with it by doing things like putting rubbish in front of the camera but not covering the whole lens so that it really did look like a piece of rubbish point of view. I liked this technique and it felt like it was really something that I had made my self and actually were in my style, so I continued to take pictures in this style, my final outcome was an online book that I have on my Weebly and it is filled with my images in this style, I decided to present them like this because books are a really effective way of presenting things, I think that they are good as it doesn't take much effort to make them and they are easy to look at, the reason that I did it as an online file to go on my website/portfolio is because it is different from what I usually do, I also believe that this is my best outcome so far. The main thing that I have learnt from architecture is to experiment and how to experiment with different things like what I photograph and where I photograph it, who I study and to make sure that I don't just copy their work.
In conclusion, I think that photography over component one has taught me a lot in terms of style and my way of photography, I also think that photographers have influenced my work a lot as well. In my opinion, photography over component one has really been me finding my feet and solidifying my style of photography and now that is done I think that I can really focus on getting he rest of my grade for the rest of year eleven.
Abstraction was easier than all the previous because by the end of the project I had everything set in stone about the way that I like to do photography and knew what I was doing, it also felt a lot more free, because it wasn't as restricted as everything before which is one of my favourite parts about abstraction, nothing has to really make sense visually. my style of abstract photography I would describe as being very close to the subject and also very low, the focus of my photographs either started low or were just very low to the ground. throughout the project I did many case studies on artists and photographs, two that I did on Akihiko Myoshi and Bill Armstrong, these two photographers work highly influenced my work and I, in fact, did my final piece influenced by their work, their work is about things like disruption, for example Bill Armstrong makes unfocused, extremely vibrant pictures and sometimes even paints colour onto them, Akihiko Miyoshi has done things like putting colourfull tape over his camera lens and taking a picture, this creates the effect of a filter when its just the tape. From those two artists, I learnt a lot about disruption of images which I still really like to do today however in abstraction as a whole the main thing that I learnt would probably be how to make images my own whilst also taking inspiration from other photographers who do similar things that I am interested in.
architecture I found to be one of my favourites because when I take pictures they are either very close or low to the ground and it is easy to see what is in frame, when I found out that we could choose whatever topic we wanted out of the selection my first thought was definitely architecture because I couldn't think of anything better to take pictures from a low point of view than a building. I started off by just doing some case studies into artists and images that they took, one artist that took my eye was Berenice Abbott she was popular from the 1930s-60s and she used to have old black and white cameras to take pictures on and used to sometimes take pictures of buildings either from the top or from a human point of view, I started off abstraction by studying her and taking pictures in black and white then editing them to look like hers. But then I realised that I should really just leave that as a case study and I realised that I had gone away from my own style and tried to be like hers, so I started taking these pictures that were of buildings and constructions however they were once again from a low point of view and this time I decided to experiment with it by doing things like putting rubbish in front of the camera but not covering the whole lens so that it really did look like a piece of rubbish point of view. I liked this technique and it felt like it was really something that I had made my self and actually were in my style, so I continued to take pictures in this style, my final outcome was an online book that I have on my Weebly and it is filled with my images in this style, I decided to present them like this because books are a really effective way of presenting things, I think that they are good as it doesn't take much effort to make them and they are easy to look at, the reason that I did it as an online file to go on my website/portfolio is because it is different from what I usually do, I also believe that this is my best outcome so far. The main thing that I have learnt from architecture is to experiment and how to experiment with different things like what I photograph and where I photograph it, who I study and to make sure that I don't just copy their work.
In conclusion, I think that photography over component one has taught me a lot in terms of style and my way of photography, I also think that photographers have influenced my work a lot as well. In my opinion, photography over component one has really been me finding my feet and solidifying my style of photography and now that is done I think that I can really focus on getting he rest of my grade for the rest of year eleven.