For our first brief on the first year of the University Course, FDA Digital Media Production Photography Pathway, was to create images to go into the college FE/HE BSDC Prospectus. We were asked, along with the design students, to come together to produce work that was going to be new, fresh, original and eye catching but also show different aspects of the campus and also the surrounding areas and obviously show different areas in which the students could learn in.
Every student has a specific area to work within so that everything got covered, my areas were to work with the Catering students at first, then go down into the Textiles classrooms and then finally i also had enough time to go into the Motoring Vehicles area of the College.
For me, the most significant aspects of this task, was to try out new ideas with my images and try to be more daring than sticking to the old, boring College images that we see today. At the time, i thought to myself that i was giving myself too much of a big task to handle by myself, but i thought to myself, i need to push on and just get my head down and get the work done. I had plenty of photographs to look through and plenty to edit to see which would work best for the Prospectus. The most important aspect as well, was making sure that the images were going to fit in with the rest of the work, as all the final photographs were collected on a memory stick from all students and then they looked through them to see which would work better together.
Having experienced this type of photography, i now realise that it is something that i don't want to go into within my career as a photographer. But, furthermore i have learnt a lot from this experience; for example, being able to work alone and get some really interesting images and also being pushed on a really tight time scale but still produce an exceptional piece of work to put forward to go into the Prospectus. Being involved in this experience, it didn't do much for my photography skills but it helped me advance on my photoshop skills, as i liked to distort the photographs with different shapes and to bring something different to the photographs. It took me awhile to figure out on how to achieve the look i was going for, but i got there in the end and self taught myself on how to create that look. This experience made me feel very pressured and it wasn't something that i particularly enjoyed, but i did get the work done in the end and i do like the photographs that created even though they are much different to what i would normally create. Learning this skill will be very important to me as a learner and a practitioner, as i will be able to push my photographs a lot further with what i have learnt. Because i did not like the subject that i was shooting, but loved the editing process that i did on the photographs, i need to apply my skills to photographs which are my style and make them into something which will have my name on it as soon as you see it.
