Final Shoot 1 - Work Record/Journey

Final Shoot 1
Journey - What I hope to achieve
For the first photoshoot of the Exam I have decided to create a visual journey using movement. The journey will show a day at college for me and will feature some personal items that I bring to college everyday.
The shoot will carry out 9 or more activities that occur in my everyday college life. I will overall chose 9 images to put into a grid of 9 that will progressively show my journey throughout college.
The images, as they are representing something that has happened in the past, will be edited to appear black and white. I have not previously edited images black and white within Component 2.

What I have achieved
Looking at the unedited images, I have achieved what I wanted to achieve in my first shoot. I have over 9 activities or moments of my everyday college day and have chosen my top 9 images to put into the time line grid.
When shooting the images, I used specific camera settings to enable me to add movement into the images. I first set the camera onto shutter priority which allowed me to chose a certain amount of seconds that the shutter on the camera stayed shut for; I chose 8 seconds. This gave me enough time to take part in the activity that I was capturing to show the activity taking place. I chose to show the activity in action to make the images more visually interesting. I feel that if I just took the images on a shutter speed of 1/30 of a second and not feature any movement, the images would not be as interesting.

Edits
All of these images were edited the same way. They were turned black and white and some of them has curve fixtures to either dim or intensify the light. Each image however was edited on a different black and white scale so that specific colours within the image would be more intense in the black and white format.

Firstly, I took the unedited image and adjusted the curves slightly within the images. Some images did not require this step as I felt that the lighting was perfect in some images.

I then adjusted the images to change the colour format to black and white. When doing this I could adjust specific colour hues within the images and intensify the black and white tones within the image. For example, as there was a lot of blue hues within the first image shown below, I used the blue hue adjuster and increased the intensity of the blue hues so they would appear darker in the black and white image.
Finally, I flattened the image so that all of the editing would compress into the image and then saved the images as a JPEG image.
The images you see on the left are unedited and the images on the right are edited.

This first image shows some personal items that belong to me or are a part of my everyday college life. These items are the fundamentals to my college day and are what are needed. I laid the images out in a random matter so that the image looked like a natural scene form my day.
As the subject matter is self Identity, in every image I made a certain item, that was a part of me or showed who I am, blurred/opaque to single out this one object to further intensify the personal aspect to these images. For this image in particular is was my ID card. This card has details about me on it and also holds an image of me on it. I felt like this was the most obvious item to single out.

This next image features, simply, me putting on my backpack. To take this image I set the camera on a timer so that I would have time to move into frame to take the image. I used a plain black background as I wanted the focus of this image to be me and the backpack alone with no loud distractions in the background. I chose to make the backpack in the image blurred as this carries all of the college materials within; it also holds all of my personal items.


This image features me working at a computer. The majority of my courses at college require a computer. Therefore, this is a key aspect of my day. This image featured two aspects of me that were blurred. My phone and my hands. I chose these things to be blurred as it shows a specific movement and activity taking place overtime. This image required an extra step to editing. This step was the use of the spot healing tool which helped me perfect the background of the image as there were a few slight imperfections on the background such as marks or scratches on the table.

This next image shows Lunch taking place and features a lot of movement within the image. This was the only image where I wanted a majority of the things in the image to be moving. I wanted this image to be different as it features more people than myself. Despite this, all of the people within the image are a part of me as they're my friends. I therefore wanted to show this with the busy movement of the images. This image is still personalised with the use of my phone; which is featured in many other images.

This is the final overall image of the first shoot. The images themselves may have connotations to them but I wanted to focus on the sole connotation of the final outcome and the story it tells. The images tell a story of my everyday college life and what it features. From left to right and top to bottom, you can see a simple story that is very effective in helping myself and other audience members identify who I am and what I do daily.
Each image represents a different activity or scene:
Image 1 is a preview of personal items that I use on a day-to-day basis in and out of college.
Image 2 shows me and friends entering the college to start the day/
Image 3 shows me and other people walking through the corridors. You can also see other students living their college lives also.
Image 4 shows me working in a written lesson.
Image 5 shows Lunch, an activity that is shows with friends.
Image 6 shows a conversation happening between me and a friend. This also represents the Lunch portion of the day.
Image 7 shows a Photography lesson, a lesson that I particularly enjoy. I captured another student photographing her model to represent this.
Image 8 shows me working on a computer which is a recurrence in everyday at college for me.
Image 9 shows me putting on my backpack to leave college.
These 9 simple images, I believe, show my everyday college life easily and have a narrative behind them. All of the images feature something relevant or special to me and also show what I do on a day-to-day basis which is a key aspect of my self identity.

This image was created through the use of Photoshop. I simply, took all 9 images and evenly spaced them apart, on a black white canvas, into a 3x3 grid to show the story of all 9 images in one. All of the images are in black and white to show the past events and to also show memories. I feel that if the images were in colour then they would be showing present events and in the future, they will not be present, they will be memories.

What I will do next
I believe that this first photoshoot was a success. The images were composed how I wanted them to be composed and the content, connotations and story of the images link to the criteria of the Exam Paper. All of the images were composed differently in terms of camera angles but were all shot using the natural lighting around me and the same camera settings.
As the next shoot will be something that is very different to this particular shoot, It is difficult to say what I can improve on; especially when I feel that the images are perfectly composed. For this shoot I used a tripod and specific camera settings. Therefore, in the next shoot I will not use a tripod and also will use different camera settings to experiment in the way I take photos and to also vary the way my images look.