Intro

So the first year of Uni is over, now on to the next. It was a fun first year with lots of exciting projects, but a few stood out in particular and were more enjoyable than others. The year consisted of a breakdown into 4 running assignments, Photography Practises, Photography Projects, Digital Environment and Critical & Cultural Studies each having there own unique and distinctive projects within.

Photography Practises

This assignment consisted of 4 projects stretched across the academic year, the projects were architecture, portraiture, still life and fashion. Three of the projects were based in the studio, the portraiture, still life and fashion, and so this is where we learnt lots of lighting techniques and methods and were able to apply them to our own work, the architecture was more about learning location work and experimentation with perspective.

Out of the four projects I enjoyed the architecture and working on location the most. I felt it was more freeing and more enjoyable than the others as its more inline with what I would like to be doing later on, although we learnt valuable studio lighting and set up skills with the other projects which will come in handy later on without a doubt. In the image on the right you can see a selection of my work from three of the four projects. These projects were more brief orientated and less experimental and personal than the other assignments.

Images above are from my Architecture, Still Life and Fashion Projects.

Digital Environment

This assignment was completely digitally based, hence the name, and this is where we learnt Photoshop skills, about how to correctly edit and process images to optimise work flow to produce and improve our images. These projects were extremely helpful as the skills learnt could be applied to all other projects and all other work in the future by helping increase the quality of the work produced and increase efficiency while editing and processing.

The year was split into two running projects, the first was teaching us techniques on Photoshop and applying them to given images as well as our own. The second project was to create a Photobook full of our own images edited and processed using the techniques we had learnt from the previous module. 

One of my images made for my Photobook.

Photography Project

This assignment was split into several projects, each quite experimental where we got to work with different techniques of capturing and printing images such as video recording, creating cyanotypes and Photoshop work. The projects were fun and it was useful to find out how to print images in lots of different none conventional ways so that we could use these techniques later on in different projects and other work we do. Working with the different techniques such as the salt prints, pin-hole camera and matt medium was fun and it was good to see the different effects each had on the images so we could apply it to our own work and get more hands on with the experimentation.

As well as the old style prints we also did some video recording and editing, this was part of the project were we worked in groups to create a video based on something nature related, although it was good to work with video as another medium and another method of creating art, I don't think it was as successful as the other projects we did for this assignment.

The images on the below show some of the experimentation from this project, one image being a double exposure created digitally and the other being a salt print created in the darkroom.

Image on the left created digitally on Photoshop. Image on the right created in the darkroom as a salt print.

Cultural and Critical Studies

This is where we learnt all the theory side of photography. The most useful part probably was learning about the semiotics behind the images, learning about the reason behind the photos, the messages they give off, so that we could apply this to our own work, to give our own art work more meaning and understand other artist's work better.