Final Evaluation

I think that my project was quite successful, I explored age in portraiture in a variety of ways, at the beginning of my project I was taking photographs of many different ages, however at the midterm evaluation I decided to hone in on youth portraiture as I decided that it would be better because I was able to experiment with the images more. This is because I am around people my own age more so I was able to take more photographs in the studio at college and when I was out as well.

When selecting my final portfolio, I looked at each shoot individually and selected my favourite photographs from each one, however some of my shoots worked better than others and I also wanted the portfolio to work well together, showing how my photography progressed without looking messy. At the beginning my photographs were a lot more colourful and candid, however as I explored studio work, they became a lot more structured and deadpan. I think that this style worked really well as it allowed me to focus on the lighting and the background etc. 
I think I have created a cohesive body of work, although I think that if I had done a few more shoots then it would've worked better, some of my earlier shoots aren't as good as I think they could've been 

This image is from one of my earlier shoots, and although I like the photograph, I think it is of much lower quality when comparing it to a later shoot. At the beginning of my project, I wanted to take photographs in a variety of places to have interesting backgrounds, although I ended up enjoying doing shoots in the studio, I think they worked well.
This photograph is good, although candid images don't always work well and look like they are too posed. They aren't a reliable style of photography.

This is one of my later shoots, I really like how this worked as I used one light to light up the face and left the background without light, this created the effect that I wanted which was the style of Chuck Close's portraits, I really liked the daguerreotype style as it means that the audience can focus on the features of the subject, as it is in extreme detail, rather than looking at what is going on in the image like in some busier images.

I believe that this is a cohesive body of work because it shows progression, as I got the shoots done you can see a change as I tried out different things like studio work or deadpan portraiture. I really like the later shoots that I did in the studio and I like the gifs that I made in photoshop.

I like this gif because it definitely shows what I wanted, I wanted to look at the difference between the deadpan image and the smiling image as they contrast quite a bit. I think that these two gifs are definitely different, you can tell that I improved from my first gif to my second. Firstly, the second gif has much better lighting, the first gif has a slight vignette. This is because I placed the back lighting incorrectly and it was slightly hitting the subject, whereas in the second gif, I didn't have this problem as I learn't from my mistakes. Furthermore, the first gif is a lot more jolty and it doesn't flow as well, the subject moved too much and I didn't correct it during editing. Although in the second gif, the movement flows a lot better, the subject doesn't move very much at all.

 My work was definitely influenced by my research, I was really inspired by the work of Thomas Ruff and Chuck Close, they both used deadpan in their work, which I really liked exploring in my own work. Both of these photographers worked in the studio, although they did their work very differently, Ruff worked mostly with lighter backgrounds, whereas Close used black backgrounds so that there was a heavy contrast with the white/grey colour of the faces. He focused solely on the subjects face, with a very small area of focus. Whilst Ruff used a large area of focus and the whole subject is in focus.

Originally, I wanted to look into different ages, focusing on portraiture, although as I started the project, I decided that it would be better to focus on youth as there is a larger opportunity for me to take photographs. At the beginning of my project, I took photographs of a variety of ages, although at the end of the project I focused solely on people my age so around 16-18 years old. I really enjoyed this as it gave me more variety in locations, I could easily do studio work, but also I could go out to London with friends and take photographs there. Whereas for me it was slightly more difficult to take photographs of younger children and older people as I don't know that many old people and children can be difficult to photograph.