Photography Coursework Roundup

On the 1st February, I FINALLY handed in my photography coursework! It has been a long 4 and a bit months completing this and I am so glad that it is over! I put so much work into this project and I just can’t believe its all over (well that’s what I thought until I was handed the exam paper on the same day!).

What’s my Photography project about?

This project was all about Beauty. We had to pick a title for our project that was based around beauty, so I went with The Beauty of Colour in Every Day Life. What this basically means in my mind is lots and lots of street photography. I was really struggling to come up with something that I liked for this project, so I based it off of people and colourful things.

Artists

It was fairly easy picking my artists for this as there are soooooo many street photographers out there! I knew I wanted to start with Saul Leiter. I’d seen his work in class and I really liked his use of focus. Most of his images have a really blurry and nice background to it. I love me a nice blurry background, so I knew this was something I wanted to do.

When on google, you can look at similar photographers and that is when I found Nick Turpin. Turpin has a book called ‘On the Night Bus’. Firstly, I was drawn to this as I thought we were talking about the night bus in Harry Potter. However, this was not the case, but his images are still really cool! Turpin goes around London on a rainy evening taking photos of people on busses. This sounds a bit weird and I guess its a bit stalkerish, but the photos he produces are awesome.

My teacher told me about a painter, which I found weird that I was looking at a painter, but I went with it. He said that he was similar to the kind of images that I was going for. Edward Hopper painted images of people sat in cafe’s and in their houses, which is quite voyeristic and a bit personal.

Jesse Marlow is a street photographer that I found online. He takes some really cool street photographs. Marlow also uses lots of colours in his images, which fitted with my project perfectly! However, I only used similar techniques to Marlow. With the other artists I tried to copy their images. However, for this shoot I wanted to take images of people ice skating, as in all honesty that was much easier than Marlow’s work.

Another artist I looked at was Joel Meyerowitz. He was another street photographer, however he took some really cool images of lights. I thought that this would go really well with my project and it was something a little different to my other artists.

My Work

I took inspiration from all of my artists and came up with my set of images, that I am actually really happy with. I think my favourite has got to be of this purple man. When I was in London, I saw this man in South Kensington. He was dressed in head to toe purple! He even had purple glasses! Basically, everything was purple! I honestly couldn’t believe that this person who fit the description of my project perfectly! So, whoever this purple man is, I can’t thank you enough! You made my day, and I would even go as far and say that you made the project! You are a star and you keep wearing purple as much as you want!

Another favourite has to be this one of a boy from a local school at a bus stop. This was inspired by Nick Turpin’s work. I was having a really bad day that day. I needed rain, and do you think there was an inch of rain that day, no. It was my last opportunity to take images for the project, so I was not having a great day. Whilst on the shoot, I got slightly bored, and I ended up taking images of anything that I thought would work. I took the image into Photoshop and had a fiddle with it, and all of a sudden, I had done something and could not believe how well the image had turned out!

My third favourite image from this shoot is this one of my Mum. Not because its one of the best images that I have taken, but because I’m so grateful for everything my Mum has done with this project for me! I think my Mum came with me on all of my shoots but one. I have not been enjoying my photography lessons all that much at the moment, so I need a little bit of encouragement. Mum being there pushes me to do all that I need to, and therefore I finished the project on time. Thanks Mum!

Sketchbook

With this project I had to complete two sketchbooks. The first we started in the summer and we went into the dark room and learnt how to develop images.

Photobook

I stupidly realise as I write this that I never exactly took a photograph of this which I am super annoyed about now, so I will have to describe it for you! The front cover of the book is black and has a window in it, in the window you can see the purple man poking through.

For my photobook we had to write this big essay all about our work. This essay was really long! Mine was over 2000 words! It had to include things about the artists that we had been inspired by, what kind of thing we wanted to do for our project, images from the artists and also about the camera techniques we were going to do for our work.

After the essay, I FINALLY got to show our final images that I had selected from the shoots. I am really happy with how it turned out!

In fact, I’m really happy with how the entire thing has turned out! You can check out more photos on my Instagram! I am incredibly glad that this project is over though 😂 I am very done with this project and am looking forward to starting something new!