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The Brief.
Produce a photographic essay exploring a subject, comprising 5-10 images. Your images could aim to educate and/or entertain and/or inform.
Statement of Intent.
For my photography brief I intend to capture different types of relationships to show contrast and how expressions in a photograph set the mood. I have chosen 3 different relationships with which I intend to try and capture a good relationship and a bad relationship for each, I intend to communicate to the viewer the differences between each relationship. I will experiment with aperture and shutter speeds and use Photoshop CS3 to manipulate images.
Planning.
Relationship between Parent and child
My idea for this photo is to capture my cousin Chris and his wife Caroline with their daughter Alexia. I want to capture a candid moment between both parent and child, which expresses their love for one another. The photo will be taken in their home or garden to set the mood and to make them feel more at ease. Capturing a bad relationship might prove quite challenging with a young child of 3 years old so the second photograph may have to be staged to create a look of tension between the two.The use of body language is important in trying to differentiate both photographs.
Relationship between Friends
For this photograph I plan to use a group of my friends from work. I plan to use a casual and informal setting such as a pub to capture a relaxed series of photographs. My idea is to have them both laughing is to convey to the viewer of the photo that the relationship is a good one. For my second photo of a bad relationship I would like to keep the same people from the first photo and in the same setting. My idea for the bad relationship is to have one of the friends positioned with their back to the camera sat in the left of the photo and the other sat in front with the camera focused on her face. Her expression will be quite angry and you will see the anger in her eyes. I would use depth of field to focus on the friend with the angry expression and to focus out from the friend with her back to the camera.
Relationships between Partners
I plan to use my sister Becky and her boyfriend Gareth at home to produce some relaxed photographs of them together in love. My idea for the bad relationship is to have them post-argument sat on a bed with my sister looking upset. Tense body language is important to differentiate the two photos.
Research.
I did not intentionally research photographers for this project but used my knowledge of some of the photographers I already admire and have researched in the past.
Lara Jade www.flickr.com/photos/larajade
(This is a link to some of the commissions she has done which I found quite useful especially the ones of Laura and Lewis and Hollie and Cohen)
Eugene Richards www.eugenerichards.com
(I admire how he captures candid moments with so much power and meaning behind them)
Evaluation of my work.
Did my project work out as planned?
My initial intentions for my project was for each relationship to show a good and bad point of view, but as I progressed through my brief I found it much harder to take photos of bad relationships than good relationships. Because alot of the bad relationship photos were staged they didnt look as candid as I would have liked them too.
Before manipulating this image in photoshop I realised Alexia had red eye in the photograph. This was because of the dark lighting and the intensity of the flash bulb. In photoshop I used the remove red eye tool in the healing brushes section to zoom in and select the red eye.
One of the photographs I took attempting to capture a bad relationship between friends, didnt work very well. I think the expression on my subjects face looked more interested than angry which I thought may confuse the viewer of the photograph.
Could it be improved?
Although I was happy with my photographs of the relationships between parent and child I learnt alot from photographing children. Alexia was very quick to photogaph and unforunately I left the camera on manual focus, whereas if I had turned it to auto focus it would have probably resulted in more good quality photographs. The lighting was very dark in all of my photographs too as they where taken indoors mostly in the evening so I had to use my flash alot, getting the shutter speed right prooved difficult and I sometimes had to use a tripod. I could of improved the photos by photographing in better lighting conditions or by using a bigger flash gun.
Sarah Aylward | Copyright ©