Lauren Barrett A2 Photography Unit 4

Project Evaluation:

For my Unit 4 portfolio, I decided to explore the theme of Fantasy. I honestly think that this has been my favourite unit out of all of the projects I have completed over the last 2 years, because it gave me the biggest opportunity to be creative and have more fun with my work. I was immediately drawn to the theme of Fantasy as soon as the Unit 4 paper was released, as the idea of creating mythical characters and surreal imagery has always been an interesting topic for me, and I felt that I was ready to take on such a huge photographic challenge. Unit 4 has been the only unit where I have had most of my shoots planned from the very start, which allowed me to complete all of my physical work early enough to allow me extra time towards the end of the project to dedicate to my

contextual work as well as experimenting, which is often the complete opposite of how I have had to work on previous portfolios. Whilst I enjoyed designing all of my potential shoots, props, characters and locations, it was physically very challenging, as I often had to spend the previous night cutting out various

shapes from cardboard and then painting them to my desired effect. Then there was the challenging side of actually setting up my shoots, which often involved me hanging some of the shapes and letters I had created the night before using fishing wire, which often took up a lot of my time prior to the actual shoot itself. However, I somewhat enjoyed that process as I could feel myself really putting effort into each and every shoot, whereas I might not have cared as much during Units 1-3, and it was nice to see my hard work build up to create my final pieces at the end. These processes of creating and setting up cardboard props lead to me following a sub-topic of storybooks and fairytales, hence the idea of pop-up characters and settings, which helped to influence my shoots ahead to allow a strict and recurring theme throughout.

There weren’t many shoots that I didn’t enjoy this year, but my favourites were actually my shoots from my exam. I surprisingly enjoyed the exam, and felt calm about conducting the three separate shoots as I felt I had enough experience and knowledge to get beautiful results without any official help. I even used an ‘outside’ model for the first time during the exam; a young girl called Amy whose mum responded to an advert I posted on Facebook. Although I was nervous about working with someone I had never met before, it actually encouraged me to provide the best pictures possible and I actually had a lot of fun. My favourite from the week was

my ‘Little Mermaid’ inspired shoot with my friend Jess. She was able to drive us to Clacton at the time, which was exciting because the beach was the perfect setting for my mermaid-themed shoot and added a greater sense of realism to my work. I enjoyed working somewhere where I had never photographed before, and I think the colours in the costume that I had also created worked really

Lauren Barrett A2 Photography Unit 4

well in the surrounding scenery, which really made my final pieces stand out. The shoot was inspired by Annie Leibovitz, one of my favourite photographers of all time, and her Disney Dreams series where she photographs celebrities in Disney costume and setting to show similarities between the cartoon itself. I wasn’t particularly impressed by her ‘Little Mermaid’ shoot, which inspired me to do it myself, and I personally feel that the results are as good as they could have been considering I was working on a dramatically smaller budget!

Other than my exam work, my other favourite shoot is the one inspired by magical spells and potions, such as those seen in Fantasy films such as Harry

Potter. I did two like this, to show my progression and experiments, as I couldn’t work out the best way to light the shots to get a ‘glowing’ effect from the food colouring as I placed it into each glass of water. I started by lighting the white background only, and placing a square object either side of the glasses to create a distinctive black line

around the edge of each glass to make it stand out against the background. Whilst this did work, the food colouring that I used was quite old, and so they didn’t come out very bright in the images. I then tried a different technique of placing the glasses on top of a light-box, and with the use of some brand new colours, the images looked like they were glowing, which is the exact effect I was looking for, and so it certainly brought a more magical appearance to my work. This shoot also allowed me to create an animation, where I made the colours in one image fade throughout the entre colour spectrum and repeat, which I would say is one of the strongest and most aesthetically beautiful pieces I have ever created.

Overall, I would say I haven’t had any negative thoughts about this Unit. I certainly learned from previous topics to keep on top of my contextual work so that it doesn’t seem so much, which I did do and it really helped me to focus on my physical photography more. I have had so much fun conducting all of my shoots and experiments, bringing the dreamlike world to life, and I only hope that I get to keep-up photography as one of my hobbies once I move on to University at the end of September.