Final Evaluation

I have just finished my Unit 2 for photography and for this unit we had the choice of five exam questions and personally I have chosen to look at Creative Use of Light, initially I was thinking about looking at the weather question however after one shoot I decided to change it due to it being very difficult to know how the weather will be on a particular day. I then chose Creative us of Light and started this by looking through images online and creating an image bank of images that I felt would fit into my topic and which I would like to look at. From these image banks I was able to acquire 6 different types of shoots, for example there were glow stick shoots, light graffiti, fairy lights, natural light (shadows) and also other unusual ideas such as UV paint/makeup.

I started off by looking through any of my old shoots, for example a shoot of fireworks and others from when I have gone out to do my own photography that does not relate to my A level and I found some good images which I felt fit into my topic very well.

I then started looking at taking some similar images to my image banks and my first shoots were of glow sticks and candles as I felt that this was a good way to start as from these shoots I learned a few things. For example, I learnt from these that it worked out much better if I used manual focus rather than automatic and I also had to use the macro setting for some images due to wanting to photograph in detail. These shoots were not the most successful and after a few attempts, I decided that this may not be the type of images that I would like to look at and I have also found other styles of photography which I feel would be more suited for me, for example a UV shoot.

After deciding to look at some different ideas within my work, I started to focus on a UV paint shoot and I wanted to focus the style of which on some of Hid Said Neto’s work and I felt that he was the main influence for my work. For my first shoot of this I decided to do a self-portrait shoot as I felt that this would mean that I could familiarise myself with the style and after the shoot, I was very happy with the outcome and this made my mind up on the track I wanted to follow for the rest of the unit.

 I went on to do a further 2 shoots for my coursework in this style and also focused my exam on this style of work however I also changed my work slightly at this point also. I did this during my third UV shoot when I decided I would make a video of my final photographs rather than uploading straight images and I felt that this was a very unique yet effective method of displaying my work and again this influenced my future work.

During my exam I chose to do two shoots, the first being a shoot in which I recorded myself applying UV paint onto a bunch of flowers and then sped the video up using PremierPro. I felt that this was a very successful shoot and this gave me confidence to then go onto my second shoot during the exam which again I recorded myself applying UV paint to a model however I made this different to my coursework shoots by flicking the paint on my model rather than applying it in a particular style. I felt that my final outcome for this was very successful other than a few flashes within the video from the other side of the studio and I wish I had an extra 5 minutes to be able to crop these out however I believe that this shoot turned out very well. During my exam I also produced a few straight images as well as the video and I feel that these also looked very good and I am very happy with my exam in general.

After my exam shoot, I was then able to photograph one final shoot and de to using the UV paint within my exam shoot, I felt that it would be better to explore one other style of photograph and so I focused on a shoot involving sparklers. For this I slowed down the shutter speed and was able to produce a light graffiti image from sparklers. I have a few very successful straight images from this shoot however I also have some not so successful images.