Work Diary - Shoot 10

Evaluation

In today's shoot, I found it to be my most enjoyable, creative and successful one so far. The more shoots I tend to do, the more I find them successful as the further I've escalated in this project, each shoot has always been an improvement from the last. I wanted to continue my surreal theme of books since shoot 6 as I liked my idea of looking at knowledge and open minded people through this kind of photography. It links to the piece I produced in shoot 6 which is why I wanted to develop some more ideas, along with my library photography found in shoot 4 and 9. Each piece took a long length of time to be completed, however each one was a success when finally constructed. Looking at surreal photography has really inspired me and made me more intrigued in this style of photography as it questions reality and the mind. The photographer that inspired this shoot of mine was Joel Robinson as he has created lots of pieces on looking at book surrealism. He's part of my photographer research and one of my main inspirations for this project of mine. I found it difficult when cutting around the models I was using in my pieces as their was always such fine detail to look at and get right. I had to make sure they were also positioned in a way that was appropriate to fit the other object in a picture e.g sitting on top of a book etc. Overall this lesson was extremely fun and successful that I will definitely be doing more surreal pieces in the future of this project. 

This was my favourite piece I created from the shoot as I believe that it was generally the most successful one. My reasons for this are because I was able to edit the picture precisely to create that looks as though I am sat on a pile of books. I can't decided whether I look smaller however, or if the books look bigger because it's a difficult illusion to judge. I perhaps could have shrunk my size a little more to make me look even smalle, but overall I believe the idea behind this image and the composition of it was well thought about and also successfully constructed.

This was another successful image of mine, however I feel that the surrealism of it is perhaps a little obvious. My idea behind this photograph was that books are filled with imagination, always. Something the skittles company say is that these sweets feed your imagination. I wanted to link this with the idea of books bursting with creativity, and the sweets are a physical symbol of the imagination and creative thought exploding out from the pages. I liked my idea behind this, although perhaps the sweets being so defined and saturated compared to the book make this piece look less realistic. A positive however would be the fact I added shadows beneath the skittles to convey how they're actually there instead of just placed. This went well, along with the idea, it's just the reality of the overall image that I question.

Progression

As part of my progression stage after this shoot, I have found something through these surreal images that I quite like the thought of. Since editing skittles into the book photograph to convey a theme of imagination, I'd like to further this idea and perhaps look at sweets exploding out of their actual packet for example,  I could get a picture of someone holding a skittles packet with the contents bouncing out from the broken seal. I could then also develop this by taking ordinary photographs of sweet bowls or sweet packets or even a selection of confectionary spread out across a table and capture images in the style of one of my favourite formal elements, depth. I will always keep linking back my work to subtopics I have found interest in through my starting point of evidence. I would also like to create a piece similar to the pictures in my previous work diary progression section as this could include my surreal theme with my depth theme.