Evaluations – Places

Evaluations – Places
For the places brief I started off with no concept at all and couldn’t find any inspiration. I decided to start by doing some wilderness/countryside images as this is the genre that’s most accessible to me. They didn’t turn out very exciting. I decided to have a go at the significant places, as I had a solid idea of what I wanted to do, I went to the street where I grew up and shot a roll of film using my Holga 120 GCFN. I planned on cross processing these images as I wanted them to have the feel of childhood memories, unfortunately this didn’t work and my negatives turned out black – apparently the chemicals had been left open for a while. Next, I had a short trip to the now abandoned Blackburn Royal Infirmary for the alien/foreign part of the brief, we only explored the bottom floor as we couldn’t find the stairs and it was very dark so I had to use a high ISO which made my images rather grainy, this prompted a second visit a few weeks later when we were more organised and well equipped. We managed to make it to the above floors and it was really worth it. I used a Sigma 10-20mm lens for these images as I think the wide angle distortion works really well for this genre. I then revisited the street where I grew up with my Holga once again and got all the images I wanted, this time I processed them normally in C-41 and they all turned out perfect. Next on the list was Urban or City Sprawl, I decided to shoot this around the area I live because I live in an urban area and I think it represents an urban area well – half of the houses are boarded up and derelict and half are perfect, which illustrates most urban areas – old out of date houses being closed and demolished to make way for more modern housing. The area I live in is mostly council houses and I think my photos represent this.
For my presentation of the images I decided to present my significant places images as a set because none of the images out of the 4 sets worked well enough together to present them together – they were all different shapes, formats and colours. I had enough images and a wide enough variation to present significant places as a set. I presented 15 images in a square book. We were told we could either present two of each category or eight as a set. I wanted the book to describe my childhood memories so I chose a childish font to go alongside some of the images.
Overall I think this project has been okay, although I could’ve put a lot more effort into it – I will admit places photography is not my strong point. I think the images I have come up with are technically good but I don’t find many of them very interesting, this is just my personal preference though.