Evaluation and Reflection

This first photography project has been very challenging but I have learnt a lot of new technical skills that I can use and develop with future projects. For example I explored and learnt how to capture portraiture within photography and how to create light diagrams that can help with the setting up of a photoshoot. Also I took part in a workshop, where I experimented with different lighting to help conduct a portraiture scene.

I found developing initial ideas difficult because I wasn’t really sure what to document and whether it would suit this style of photography. However, I was interested in maybe documenting a journey or a road trip but wasn’t sure how I could develop this idea. So I choose to research into a variety of documentary photographers who specific journeys that they have been on, which contain interesting points to photographs. For example I found Paul Graham’s work really intriguing because he went on a specific road trip that interested him, where he captured a range of landscapes, portraits and other qualities of the environment. I also researched into Ronnie Campana whose project is based on capturing badly repaired cars. I found this project really interesting because of how random the idea is and how it creates such a fascinating concept that might not be identified in reality. I really liked the idea of capturing cars in some way and eventually choose to develop this so that it would fit into my own documentary project.

So my idea that I came up with was to document young drivers in a positive way and to show the different types of young drivers in Dorset. I wasn’t sure what sort of style I was going to use when capturing my photographs. So for my first photo shoot I chose to experiment with different angles and directions within the car, rather than concentrating on one aspect. This photo shoot showed a lot of portraiture like style photographs that could be developed throughout this project. I chose the portraiture style idea and recreated this in another photo shoot, where I captured a variety of photographs of a young driver standing next to his car. I feel like this photoshoot was much better than the first one because I had more of an idea of what style of photography I wanted my project to base on. I then had a tutorial with Lauren, which was where I showed her this photoshoot and we organised what layout I was going to develop for my photobook. She liked the idea of doing portraiture for this project and showed me a photographer called Spencer Murphy, who uses a portraiture style in his photobook. I was really inspired by Spencer Murphy’s photobook ‘Urban Dirt Bikers’ because he uses a fascinating portraiture approach, where he captures head shots of models and then place them next to their bike in a landscape photograph style.

I then captured another photoshoot where I created photographs in a similar style to Spencer Murphy’s. I feel like this was my best photo shoot because it was more focused on the topic of young drivers and shows a variety of skills and technique. For example, Low and high depth of field. When doing this shoot I decided that I wanted the layout of my photobook to be a double page for each young driver, showing their head shot and then a landscape image of them with the car. I feel like this would be the best layout for my book because it would show a brief introduction into the young driver. I also decided that I wanted to show a statistic of the percentage of young drivers because I wanted to create a positive image of young drivers.

Overall, I feel that my photobook conveys young drivers clearly in a positive way because of how I have incorporated two different photographs of the driver to show a contrast. I think that my strengths in this project were my developing process from the start to the end. Another strength I think I developed was working with the models; I spent a lot of time relaxing them to get a true image of them. I was pleased with the outcome because this style of photography was new to me and I think I captured their different personalities as young people and drivers.

Also, using a variety of techniques to show the young drivers in a different light e.g. low and high depth of field. However a main weakness of mine was that I didn’t actually know of many young drivers so at the last minute I had to find people in carparks and ask if I could photograph them, which I wasn’t that confident about doing.

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