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Experimental Photography

Stephanie Westerman

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Evaluate: ideas eg analysis, results;I feel that my final idea’s have worked really well and they have come out exactly as I expected, if not better, though it is a slightly different design to how I specified it would be, when creating my final images manually I wanted to fill the triangle with lots of other little ones filling up the space, but when I was in the process of doing this I made a mistake with one of the shapes, which meant that I couldn’t fill in another space, but after looking at it for a couple of minutes it didn’t look as bad as I thought it did at first, so this is what made me decide to miss parts out from the image. Once I had completed the manual part of my images I then scanned them in on to the computer, when I opened the first one up on to Photoshop I noticed that one looked as if it had a holographic background, which wasn’t something I was aiming for but I think that it worked really well and it helped to add texture to my image, it also enabled me to gain the vintage that I was going for.When planning what my images where going to look like, I was stuck between David Hockney style images and John Stezaker’s, so I decided to go for doing both, in doing this I created a collage with lots of different images of the same two subjects and mixed them up and put it on top of the itself of one of the subjects as John would, I found that this made my work look more interesting.When doing the white lines on my image on Photoshop, I was inspired by the album Disclosure, with the way that their CD covers are, so this was what gave me the idea to do this on my final pieces, at the start I did it around the bodies of the subject, then after I did it around the triangle so that the shape was more vivid, I preferred this to the first version that I did so I kept the second version, as it looked neater and more professional rather than extremely messy lines around the subject.

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Qualities:To me I feel like there isn’t a weak element in my final pieces, because I understand everything that’s going on in the image, but to others that don’t know I would say that the weak point of my final images are the fact that the two subject collage is a bit confusing, the subject mixed in with the people’s faces is a dog, which is obvious to me, but when other people are looking at it they may not understand because you can’t really tell what it’s supposed to be that well because of how small all of the pieces are, if this where done on a bigger scale and to be printed out, I think that people would be able to tell straight away what the other subject is. But overall, the manual part of my images is the part that I enjoyed the most because it allowed me to be more creative with my work, which isn’t really something that I get chance to do. So I used the practical part to my advantage.The part that I like the most about my imagery is the way that the white outline around the collage breaks up everything, rather than everything just staying to one colour the white is helping to break it up and not look so boring, it’s refreshing for people to look at.

Consider the technical qualities of your work? How well done is it? What elements are strongest and which could need further work and development?When taking my images, I was using a digital camera, which did everything for me, but if I where using a proper DSLR camera, I would use a normal shutter speed, say 1/200, this is around the middle, but still quite quick, this would have enabled me to get a clear image of my subjects, which still happened with the camera that I was using the only difference is that it was done for me, I would also use the dial on the lens of the camera and look through the glass to make sure that the image would come through clear, this was also done on my camera for me, so technically, my images weren’t hard to take at all.When creating my images manually, I thought that it would take quite a while because I had to measure each part to make sure they fit in, but after I did the first one, of which took two hours, the rest only took around a hour and a bit, and the Photoshop processes I was doing also only took 5 minutes.

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How could you improve your work? Could you develop your work further with additional work? What would you try to achieve with this? Could you undertake further experiments? If so, what would they be?I think that I could have developed my work further and added things too it, but I think that it would have made my work look really cluttered, which is why I chose to keep it as minimalistic as possible. I chose to use messy lines instead of neat ones because I felt that it gave more for me to look at, I also used the rule of thirds to keep it looking modern. I also mixed it up with trying to make it look vintage with the overall effect of the image, you can see this from the hologram effect for the background of parts of the image, though I would have liked it if I could have made it have even more of that kind of effect so that it looks even more vintage, but still I’m happy with how it looks now. On slide three, the top row of images, I changed the channel mixer to make it look the same as the other images, but as you can see from looking at the middle image of the subject it didn’t work very well it just made them look a purple colour, so to change this I had to change the saturation of the image to give a normal looking skin tone again.When taking my images, I never really thought of taking them on a canted angle, but thinking about it I don’t think that It would have looked very god anyway, so I’m happy with the subject of the image being in the middle of the portrait, I also like how if you where to fold the image in half there would also be symmetry in them, so this is adding more technicality to my images.

Overall my imagery is fulfilling the brief as it says to create a minimum of three images, and I have created four, so this is actually going the extra mile on top of what the brief has stated. When creating my images, I also used a range of different kinds of media to show that I have taken in to consideration the aesthetic, technical and experimental sides of the project, to do this, I manually created the overall look of my images, i.e. mixing up the subject with parts of a different subject to create the triangle, I then scanned them in and used Photoshop to create the lines on them and to change the channel mix of the overall image.

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Final Imagery.