JL01 – EVALUATION

JL01 was all about introducing us to photography and photo editing. I had to research different types of photography, famous photographers (landscape and portrait), rural/urban landscapes and describe certain terminology of photography. I also had to produce my own edits of rural and urban photos that I took myself, as well as creating an Andy Warhol type picture of my portrait, create an image using the light-painting technique and plan and produce edits of images I took myself at Salford Quays.

For the first task I had to look at different applications of photography. This split up into 2 sections. One was to produce a detailed enough mind-map showing when photography can be and is used. Then I had to research how photography is used in several ways (advertising, fashion, music, sport, journalism and fine art) and show it off in a PowerPoint presentation. This was a task that I did relatively quickly and I feel I did quite a good job at explaining in detail how photography can be used.

The second task was about researching and analysing famous photographers work, going into detail about one of their specific photos, explaining what techniques they used and any weaknesses/strengths. I think I went into a lot of detail about their style of photography and learned and published enough information about how they achieved their specific photo.

The rural and urban task was a very enjoyable one for me. It started off quite boring though in all honesty as I had to create a mind-map which said when rural and urban photography is apparent, and then create a mood board each featuring examples of rural/urban photographs. It then got enjoyable because I was tasked with creating edits using Photoshop of rural and urban photographs that I took myself. I really enjoy using Photoshop so this was a really good task for me, and I feel like I did a good job in creating 6 individual images using several different editing techniques. I am also very happy with the final outcome of my edits and I think that my Photoshop skills are now quite good thanks to other units for other teachers where I honed my abilities using the programme.

The practical projects of creating the Andy Warhol-esque image and the light painting image were quick and simple tasks that helped to develop my photo editing and Photoshop skills. They didn’t take too long to do but were very worthwhile in terms of learning a new skill and practical tasks are always much more enjoyable than research/analysing tasks.

The photography terminology task really helped with learning about all the photography jargon that would prove important when writing about photography. This was a task that I did almost at the start so it proved helpful when doing the photographers research because I could talk about such things like the techniques they used using the proper vocabulary. I now know words such as ‘shutter speed’, ‘aperture’ and ‘composition’ – which is always a bonus.

Task 3 saw me planning a photo-shoot at Salford Quays in order to take them back to college and change the look of them through editing. I had to think about things like theme, inspirations, equipment, techniques, date/time/location and other things. I took 50 pictures exactly and chose 8 to edit. As always, the editing in Photoshop was the thing I looked forward to and enjoyed a lot. This was done quite a while ago, before my Photoshop skills were as good as I believe them to be now, so aren’t as good when compared to more recent editing work. However, I think I did quite a decent job and showed imagination when editing.

All in all, JL01 was a unit that I enjoyed. There were some good parts and some bad parts but overall I think I did okay with both the research/analysis work and practical work. Although I think if I was doing the project now the work would be of a better quality, I still think I did a fairly good job.

Alyx Entwistle