Evaluation

Upon setting out on this task I set myself, I really enjoyed the journey as well as my results. And although it doesn't fully end here, as I don't travel to South Africa until October, I feel I've come quite a long way personally, and putting everything that I have learnt over the past two years into practice. From the beginning with my presentation and interview to get to Africa, in which I am so proud of myself for achieving, gaining confidence and great people skills, I feel the project I chose to do fit perfectly. I carried out a series of portraits of a range of people, all ages, of which I am proud of. Although struggling at first technically, I feel in further shoots I perfected the technique that I wanted to achieve with a large set of high key portraits. I don't feel I had any problems in my people skills and interacted well with my sitters to get some fantastic eye contact, emotion and creativity, which from the extensive research I carried out, taught me was so important. To make the set of images I created stronger, I got the chance to do some Becker style shots of the caravans and homes that the people's portraits I had taken lived in. When stood together look great, and a strong set of images.
I feel the composition and pattern of all of the images compliment each other well, and have a factual yet aesthetically pleasing aspect to them. Along with the fact that I used the hassleblad to shoot the images, which I feel gives them a naturally beautiful quality to them, the borders of such film framing each of the images makes them stand out and look like bold, strong images even when stood alone away from the set. Although, as you can see, look much better when presented as a large group, as intended.
I learnt a great amount of new technical skills throughout this brief, including using film which I hadn't done to any great extent before, and learning to process this film in the darkroom, along with then putting my post-production skills to use in Photoshop.
All in all I feel the journey I went on for this project, matured me and improved skills in every aspect of my work, and in myself.