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.