Mid-project evaluation

When I started this project, I decided that I wanted to focus on the idea of showing clear contrasts between urban environments and rural environments, mainly through animation, documentary and landscape photography. My plan for a final outcome was to create a short film consisting of animation sequences and images that I had taken throughout my shoots. Since I have started the project, my focus has shifted from showing the contrast between showing the contrast between rural and urban to focusing on urban, due to both it being easier as I live in an urban area, and I realised I found rural landscape photography to be something I don't enjoy doing. I still hope to make a short video, however, It will have far less animation in it than I originally intended it to have, as I am focusing on experimenting with different shooting styles within an urban environments than shooting lots of animations, as I felt this would make my shoots repetitive and mean my project overall lacks experimentation.

I feel that so far, my shoots have mostly been successful. My first two shoots have been animation shoots, in which I positioned my camera in one position, set it to continual shoot mode then moved around. My first one was taken from the passenger seat from a moving car, and the second, from the deck of a moving boat. Since I had no tripod to hand when I shot these, I had to shoot freehand, which in my first shoot, in which I had nothing to lean on, meant that I got some camera shake would could have been prevented by either shooting using a faster shutter speed or by using some kind of camera stabiliser. My second shoot however, was an improvement as I had the railing of the boat to lean on, meaning there was significantly less camera shake. These shoots were both taken in a rural environment, so I decided my third shoot would take place in an urban environment. My third shoot was focused on urban architecture, which I wanted to portray as being very methodical and repetitive, link to the idea of Brutalism. I feel this shoot went better than the animation shoot, as it allowed me to experiment with different shooting styles and methods, such as multiple exposure. While this shoot was successful in that it created a different style to that of my animation shoots, some of the images were noticeably not level, as a result of not using a tripod, which definitely takes away from it being in an architectural photography style, as it often is very neat and perfectly framed. For my fourth shoot, which my most recent, I decided to people within an urban environment in a street photography style. I went out with a tripod and mounted it in two different locations, taking long exposure images in each. The idea for the shoot was to try and capture the pace of living in a urban environment and the busyness of the people who live there. While this shoot was successful in capturing this as a subject matter, and my technique of motion blur was successfully executed, there were some things that I could have improved. Although I shot using a tripod, some of the images were still not stable due to the tripod legs not being quite at the same level as each other. Also, due to shooting using exposures of around 1 second in broad daylight, some of the images came out overexposed.

I feel that there is definitely room for improvement in the remainder of the this project. One of the things I feel I could improve on is techniques; there are times where I could have used a tripod to get much steadier images, especially during animation shoots and architecture shoots. I also feel that there has been a lack of experimenting with different techniques. Most of my shoots have been heavily location based and with little editing, so I could try to plan shoots that focus more on advanced Photoshop techniques. I also feel that some of my previous shoots could be re attempted, especially the architecture shoot, as I would try to capture more stable images using a tripod.

I definitely think that my project is going lean towards experimenting with shooting styles and editing techniques rather than the focus on street and documentary photography that my project is currently leaning towards. For my second half, I would definitely like to go back to architectural photography in different urban locations with a tripod, as I feel this concept I can get more out of than I already have. Additionally, I would like to try some more technically demanding shoots such as High Dynamic Range, as well as shooting natural light trails at night and using multiple flash.