My Ideas
How I have chosen to answer this question for the past is to go with the idea of everything looking large and appearing mysterious. As this is a personal response, I am taking it to a personal level. For example, when I was younger I felt that roads, houses, fields, fences, gates, etc would appear to be considerably larger than myself. I took this as the basis of my idea and began to think about making an abstract piece of work by experimenting with sizes and perception.
Final Idea
Personal Response Question:
How does a child's perspective alter through time?
My personal response question is based around the idea of time and how time changes and alters peoples perception of things. This can range from anything to places, peoples and even objects. To me when I was younger, the past seemed to be a completely different environment to how I view myself fitting into the environment I am now in. For example, as a young child I recall roads that now appear reasonably small or quite narrow appearing quite long and wide. This is all to do with perception and how my views have changed through time and this is why my question for my personal response is How does a child's perspective alter through time?
Artist Research: Howard Sokol
I found three pictures which Sokol took related to my 5 from 50 project. The reason I have chosen to look at his photograph because I really like the way he used lighting to light his subjects which happen to be apples and other fruits. Looking at his work has given me an insight to how I should light my photographs when doing my 5 from 50 project. However looking at his photographs I can instantly tell the photographs have been Photoshopped. I will be using the green room to experiment with the lighting and what worded well and didnt work so well when lighting my subject. Looking at the pictures with the colourful fruits and chocolate the colours really stand out and appear to look bright and vibrant. This has given me the idea to exaggerate the colours and shadows in my pictures using the shadow and highlights tool and brightness and contrast tool.
5 from 50 Composition Experimentation
To start off my response I chose to do a 5 from 50 project to experiment with the idea of perception. This idea was to get an apple and then experiment with the positioning of the apple itself (the prop) and the camera. I did this in the green room and used a black display board as the background and placed the apple on a table as that would be the space so the apple could appear to be different sizes. I then turned the lights of in the green room and used a lamp to light the apple creating shadows and highlights on the object. I also tried to apply some of the Atget rules such as framing the subject in order to create a different pint of view of the apple. I will then choose 5 pictures from my selection of images and explain why I have chosen them and what rules I applied from Atget, if I did and how I lighted my subject and what effect this had. I also looked at abstract art as this is he style I want to work with when putting my final piece together and so I have looked at abstract artists that have influenced me and what ideas they gave me.
Photoshop Experimentation & Critical Analysis
I think my 5 from 50 project started of well as I felt that the pictures were successful because I was happy with the outcome of the lighting. To start of with the project, the only props I used were a table, an apple which acted as the subject of the images and lighting equipment. How did I link this to my question? Well I took the idea of perception and size and broke that down to its simplest form which meant doing a simple but yet effective investigation which would play with the concept of size. I would do this through the different camera angles and lighting the subject differently such as lighting the apple from behind so a darker shadow would appear in front or lighting the apple form the front which then exposed the redness of the apple. Once I had taken my photographs I used Photoshop to then accentuate shadows and colours. There is full analysis of this below.
Experimentation
This experiment was done for the same purpose as the 5 from 50 experimentation. However in this experimentation I used an actual person as my subject. I lit my model using one light lamp and the flash on my camera, with all the other lights turned of so it was dark. I placed a black display board behind my model as my temporary background so when editing it would be easier to place my model into another image in front of a building. Lighting is was very important when taking these images because I wanted to create shadows on the model and I only wanted to to show there was light coming from one part of the shot. I took many many photographs and I have put them up to show you what images I took. I thought that this experimentation was unsuccessful in comparison to the 5 from 50 project because the final piece never turned out the way I wanted to. The images taken of my model were successful due to the lighting used as it looks very mysterious and dark which is exactly what I was going for as I wanted to reflect the mystery of everything surrounding a small child. However when placing theses images with the image of the building which was the end result for this experimentation it didn't work out so well due to the fact that the image of the buildings I took didn't fit the image and the purpose of the project. Some of the images below were blurry and therefore I could not use them.
Critical Analysis
My Final Piece
Below are 8 final images which I have taken and then edited as my final piece. I think my final piece is strong because it looks very different to my other work. The reason I think the final piece has been successful is because the images have met the objective as I wanted to take images of ordinary objects but change the way people look at them. I did this by taking extreme close-up shots of the objects which looks completely different to it's original physical appearance. I wanted to challenge the audiences mind because I wanted to make them think what the object in the picture could be. I did this and linked this to perspective because everyone looks at things differently so people have different perspectives to one another. Another reason I did this was to play with both the size factor in perspective as making the objects appear larger or smaller than what they actually are in images changes our perspective on the image. So I took extreme close ups as it makes a certain part of an object appear extremely large. I also wanted to create a mysterious look to my image as my question 'How does a child's perspective alter through time?' you always view everything differently even if you look at the same thing twice. I wanted to take the concept of children feeling out of place but change my idea as I didn't want to use any models in my photographs. I kept the concept by taking small everyday household objects and making them appear larger by using macro photography. Being a small child in a large place everything can seem to look scary and mysterious, this is another reason I wanted to add that element of mystery in my final piece. My final piece also looks very abstract which makes it even more interesting to look at and I think that the black and white element to most of my pictures adds to the abstract element. The composition of my camera was very important when taking the images as this was one way of hiding what the object was. I learnt a lot about composition from my 5 from 50 experimentation and therefore was able to apply this to my final piece successfully. The images that Howard Sokol took of the apples and how he kept some black and white and the other in colour made me think about how to make each image individually look effective as well as collectively. That's why only two images were in colour because they didn't look strong enough to be in the set if they were in black and whit as the redness of the image is what makes it so eye catching and intriguing to look at.
