Week 1 - Project Research Notes

Planning My Production

Photographers will continue to work individually as they did in the second year Photo Option. Photography students may print in-house or have it done at an external lab. Final framing/mounting will have to be outsourced. You are strongly encouraged to focus on a theme that has the potential to fully engage you for several months. If you choose a personal project closer to home, think carefully about whether this will reach out and engage your audience (it may well do so very effectively, but it needs careful consideration!). The scope of your work to be submitted for this term will be advised by your tutor.

Deciding on My Project Theme

By taking photography as my practical module for my final year of my Media Practice degree, I would have the creative freedom to carry out a project on any theme of my choice. Unlike working in the creative industry sector, I wouldn't be working towards a specific brief set by a client or company. Therefore, I understood this would be a great opportunity to carry out a project that I have a strong personal interest in and would be a project that would engage me and benefit from over the course of the year.
However, this I knew this would be no easy decision when I received the brief for my final year project and its development and the choice of my project's theme would need through consideration before coming to a conclusive decision. In our first workshop with our class's tutor (Paul Vincent), we all shared different resources that we all can all use as a source for inspiration for our photography project's theme [this list of resources can been seen in this week's workshop notes]. Here is some of the planning and researching I did this week towards my project's development

My List of Personal Interests in Photography and in General

• Football, in particular Arsenal FC
• Food and cooking
• Gaming
• Landscape
• Film and Theatre
• Travelling
• Architecture
• Portraiture
• Cycling
• Fashion

My Camera Roll
As a starting point, I thought it would be best if I looked over all the photograph's that I had taken on my iPhone 5C and Nikon D40X since the end of second year until now and draw out different themes and comparison within all the images. I thought this would be a good method to draw out a project theme from because all of these images, I had decided to take for my own personals reasons and if I could find a theme or project from these images, the project would be more natural and engaging for myself as a photographer.

[Add Camera Roll Images Contact Sheet]

Reflecting on all of the images in my camera, here is the list of themes I drew from them in terms of hashtags and other themes and relationships between my images:

- Social outings
- Food
- Symmetry in Architecture
- Environmental Portraiture
- Candid Moments

[Add Wordle collage of results]


From the themes listed, the ones I had a particular interest in or reoccured in the a majority of the images were themes of symmetry and ...... In particular, I really liked the idea of a doing a photography project with a theme about symmetry. Therefore, this inspired me to do a practice shoot regarding the theme of symmetry and to see what results I get because the theme is symmetry is so broad, I wanted to develop on a specific form of symmetry to develop my project.