EVALUATION

I feel that I followed my own brief very well as my main aim was to have a street photography style, concentrating on the mystery of the image- What is happening and why? I chose a theme of mystery because I thought it would allow me to be creative with what I found on the streets and I feel I was successful at this as I have a good range of images. Each of them having different possibilities of stories/mystery behind them.

I didn’t specify in my brief the type of images I was looking for; I just left my planning to chance, because you can’t plan what people will naturally be doing on the streets, you just have to take the photo as it happens. For example, like my image of the fishing rod and fish - I didn’t plan for the man to catch a fish and I didn’t know he was going to, but luckily for me he had caught one whilst I was stood behind him, and not knowing what setting my shutter speed, aperture and ISO were on, I quickly aimed the camera at the fish and hoped for the best. I didn’t know the image was going to include the fishing rod in the centre of the image and have the fish blurred out in the background, I also didn’t know I was going to be zoomed in on 55mm, but in my opinion I think the image works well like that and it is one of my favourite images from the project. Planning my images would have been too restrictive and wouldn’t have allowed me to capture images of what really happens around us.

The strengths in my final images is that they all include a range of compositional techniques such as; rule of thirds, depth of field, reflections, shadows, leading lines and framing. I feel all these techniques made my images look more eye catching and interesting to look at. I edited all my final images on Photoshop and I feel this made them look even stronger. For 3 of my images, I made them black and white as this makes them look less distracting, but also makes them look more stimulating because they look simple. It also makes us focus more on what is happening in the image, rather than concentrating on the colours.

For one of my black and white images, I edited it slightly different so that the lady waiting at the bus stop would still be in colour as she was wearing a long red coat and shoes and by leaving her in colour I feel made the image look more striking and appealing to look at.

In my brief I said that I would edit all the images to be black and white, however not all of them are because when I was writing my brief I didn’t know what images I was going to take and depending what is happening in the image depends how you edit it. It was a nice sunny day when I was out taking my photographs so I wanted to enhance this in my final images by working with the levels and saturation to make them look warm and autumn looking therefore pleasing to look at.

For improvements, I need to try and take images in more than once concept of view. For example, my image of the rope leading us to the boat, the main focus is in the centre of the image and the foreground of the rope and leaves and the background of the boat are blurry. Here isn’t much to look at in the centre of the image, so if I was to take the image again, I would change my aperture so that the focus was in the foreground, focusing on the detail of the leaves and the texture of the rope, still leaving the boat out of focus for the mystery effect. I would also take it with the rope in the left third of the image rather than dead centre, so it would allow us to see more of the boat in the background.

I feel my project as a whole went very successful as in my brief I stated that I want people to have their own opinion of the mystery of the photos and what it happening and I feel this is achievable with the images I’ve produced. For example, my image of the Fisher man by the river with his hand by his face - some people might say he’s waving, however other people might think he’s blocking the sun out of his eyes. And for my image of two people on the bridge looking at the Ipad – some people might think they’ve just taken a picture with it and are now looking at it and some people might think that they’re looking at Google maps because they’re lost and don’t know where they are.