Evaluation for photography

How did they change from your original plan/idea and were they fit for purpose once completed?

The original plan was to go off site and visit a local printing company near Derriford hospital, however as we left it to late with the paper work it seemed to make more sense if we stayed on the college site, that way we wouldn't need to wait for an unknown amount of time waiting for a confirmation email from the manager about whether we can or cannot come to the location and do the shoot.

The new plan was to take photos in the corridor/large room outside GC131 where they have tables and chairs and printers and laptops, and numerous other classrooms. What we did was borrow some old magazines from the supply room and take our own photos to create our own individual photos for the final product for the assignment. We had to do numerous retakes of the photo shoot as the quality of the final photos weren't professioanl enough, or there simply wasn't enough photos required for it to be classed as an actual photo shoot. Once we had a decent amount of photos that had good quality we were able to upload them onto our user area and begin the selection and editing process.

Do you think the images will appeal to the target audience and why?

Personally, I feel that print is a hard product to get people interested in, everything is usually computer based these days and we have become rather reliant on the internet, so if we wanted to catch the target audiences eye, we probably should have considered another product (i.e: animation, graphic design, etc.). However some people still read magazines as a form of entertainment so it is a possibility that some of the magazines used in the photo shoot are magazines certain people within the target audience are fond of and enjoy to read on a regular basis meaning that their gaze could be averted to look at the poster and advertising the course.

What do you feel you could have done differently to improve the images suitability for purpose? 

I feel that the suitability between the photos and the theme we were focused on for this unit was relevant and were suitable for this product. The brief of the product was to design a poster to promote the City College of Plymouth Media course (level 2 & 3) and instantly the idea was to pick a theme related to media which contained a range of subjects incluing photography, television, film, and many others including our chosen theme, print. As a want-to-be journalist, print instantly caught my eye and i knew that i would be putting a lot of effort into it if that was the chosen theme. I feel that if we wanted to give the audience the general idea the theme of the poster was print based we could have taken photos of other various print products and not just magazines, for example we could have used newspapers like the Herald, the Guardian, the Sun and a variety of others just to mix things up a little bit.

Secondly how do you feel about the technical quality of the final images?

After the editing there were some photos that i was rather pleased with, i experimented slightly with some of the photos whilst with others I just kept editing until I felt that they didn't need anything else done to them. Looking back at it now, I feel that with one of the photos I went over board with the editing (on the poster it is the 3rd one down on the left), however an edited photo of mine that i am rather pleased with the outcome of, is the one of the side view of the magazine (on the poster it's the 1st one up on the left), I used highlighting, shadow and contrasting tools to emphasize the pages of the magazine and at the same time the contrasting seemed to bring out the golden tones of the table which gave it a pleasant appearance.

Comment on aspects of the image such as lighting, colour, framing and composition. Do you feel the editing process made a difference to the quality of the images and how?

I think that the edditing of the contrast and the lighting made a big and drastic improvement that was definitely needed to enhance the visibility of some of the photos as some were good but at the same time were dark beyond compare which was rather distressing. However turning the graduation up seemed to make it look naturally brighter.
The contrast changed some of the colouring of the photos slightly, in some ways this worked rather well and made the photos look very dramatic and strong. However for some photos they looked false, and that they were edited too much. I tried fixing some of the 'false looking' photos by increasing the shadows and just make it look as if it were a dark and colourful image to begin with however it began to become something that looked like a cartoon which wasn't the look I was going for.

AO4 P5 Learners review the final edited photographs produced, including: a) Fitness for purpose b) Quality of images produced

06/11/2014

Today we did a workshop which was directed by Kim. Kyle and I went to see Rob and we hired out a camera and a tripod. In this workshop we learnt how to make our photos look more professional and learnt about camera settings and angles (i.e, rule of thirds, shutter speed, etc.) We went around the college learning how to take photos in different settings and how to use the basic skills like knowing what setting to use in specific locations.
I enjoyed about learning different techniques which were able to help improve my photos for the shoot and out of college hours. However I felt that i could have showed my enthusiasm as I felt that i gave off the impression that i was bored throughout this activity.

07/11/2014

Today we were looking at the options on what to photograph, at first we were considering models but then we realized we may not have enough time to look for models and even if we did they may not fit in with what we were going for. As this unit is tied up with Justine's and our photos are for the poster we picked print as our theme meaning we are wanting to put all of our focus into newspapers & magazines.
Trying to come up with a final plan was rather frustrating, and having stress outside the college did not benefit my work so I felt that this was a barrier towards my work. This has taught me to leave my personal troubles at home and learn to focus more on the tasks at hand.

14/11/2014

Today we decided to finally get our photo shoot under way. We decided just to go for simple yet effective shots of magazines with slight changes of lighting and angles. I also wanted to try experimenting with Photoshop and use some skills that I haven't used in a long time.

20/11/2014

Today I was sent out to retake the photos as apparently they were not going to be ideal to work with, so i went and got more magazines from next door and tried thinking about how effective the angles would be a bit more. However after this I was sent out again to get more then 4. I learnt that in order for a photo shoot to be successful quantity is just as important as quality. I tried my best to get started on the editing today however i was suffering from technical difficulties with the USB, but i managed to get around 10 minutes of editing done

27/11/2014

Today I finally managed to get the editing underway and pick 4 final photos that I was going to use for the poster in Justine's unit. The tool I used the most in the editing was the lighting and contrast tool, which boosted the reflections in some of the photo and highlighted the shadows in my photographs.

Task 1

Task 1

Create a document showing an understanding of the product you are creating photographs for, discuss the styles and themes you will explore in your Photographs in order to fit the product and consider potential locations. 

Our main focus for our photo shoot is the print industry, unfortunately we didn’t hear back from either the Herald, the printing shop down on the Barbican or the Harmsworth Printing. So we are going to have to think of a new plan on where to get the photos. Our theme for our photo shoot will be print related; we are considering creating a photo collage out of a variety of photo’s we are yet to take. We were thinking of creating a large picture of either the Plymouth City College logo or putting them into letters to spell out the college.

Our product is a poster for our college course, Cambridge Technical diploma level 2. In this our aim is to persuade potential students to consider taking on the course full time or part time. In order to persuade the target audience (students of any age, so adolescents to adults) our photos must meet the interests of the target audience. So if they are interested in media already then the best thing to do is to get photos of students at work in and out of the classroom doing both theory and practical work. Theory work mostly consists of computer work and writing out word documents so that is relatively simple to complete, however if we are attempting to get the media students completing practical work then we may have to consider other legislation acts as well as the data protection act where we would only need a signature from the model or the models parents or legal guardians if they are under 18. But the most important thing to remember is our main theme, print. Print is about newspapers and any other form of media which can be put onto paper itself, so this would also mean flyers, newsletters and other forms of media and advertising. If we want to get photos of the media students completing practical work then we could consider them advertising their final pieces so maybe we could get photos of the students creating their posters and printing them off or something similar.  

When considering styles and themes it is probably best to keep backgrounds and fonts simple yet effective. If we are having colourful backgrounds then we need to consider what colour and what font the text will be so we can feel positive that the reader can actually read it. So maybe if we just have a simple gradient background and a coloured text then we can put all of our focus and imagination into the photo editing, that way we can discuss a range of ideas in how to make the photo’s more eye catching. Ways to do this can be tinting the photo meaning that the whole picture has a soft shade of a colour going over it. If we do this then we would have to consider the colour and the intensity of it over the photos.

There are a couple of restrictions within the photo editing, if there are models in the photos we cannot alter their appearance in any way, we can make the picture itself have different effects (i.e. soft focus, etc.) but we cannot just change the way the model looks as it is completely changing their identity almost. We cannot change their skin colour, eye colour, physique, without their consent and even if they agree to this we have to consider a certain extent on how far we go with it. However we highly doubt we will be changing anyone’s appearance in our photos and may just consider other special effects. We can achieve these simple effects with a simple program used in Photoshop or any other form of photo editing software.

Cambridge Technicals diploma in media Level 2 @ Plymouth city college 2014

23/10/2014

Creation of progress blog, this blog is to keep track of the progress of the tasks that are and still yet to be completed, this should help keep things organised and a whole lot easier.

Achievements today:

• Confirmed a location: Classroom within the college campus.
• Completed the paper work: Including risk assessments, Recce, etc.
• Created a blog for our progress within this assignment brief