Well, here we are, at the end of another A Level project, and I am relieved to say that this is the final one! I don’t ever have to pick up my camera again, but trust me, I will be! I love taking pictures, its just all the writing up that I really don’t enjoy (and there is soooooooo much writing that you have to do!). A week ago today, I finished and handed in my exam piece for photography and I am beyond happy about this! I have been dying to finish this project for SOOOOOO long! Over the past few months, I guess you could easily say that I lost my passion for photography. I left everything to the last minute and then got incredibly stressed about everything! However, I managed to meet all the deadlines and handed in my sketchbook and my exam pieces in on time.
What is my work about?
In case you are unaware, when completing a photography exam, the exam board give you a variety of questions to pick from. The only one that really stood out to me was Land Use. If I’m honest, the reason why I picked it was because it seemed like one of the easiest questions to take pictures for. This year they had some really weird options, so I went with what I knew. I decided that I wanted to stick to mainly architectural photography as this was fairly easy. However, later on in the project I decided to expand and I included transport. Some of my images were from LA which was really nice as I will have visual memories of my trip in my work and I also have images from both Southampton and London mixed in their as well.
Artists
This time I focused on three artists.
- John Davies
- Antony Zacharias
- Simon Haleigh-Sparks
All of these are artists that you should check out as their work is pretty awesome. My favourite artist 100% being Antony Zacharias. His use of long exposure, really inspired me during this project and I would love to look into doing some more work like this in the future (just for fun though!).
My Work
I am so proud of the work that I have done over this last project. I think these are some of the best images that I have taken.
My first shoot consisted of images that I took in LA. These hold some dear memories for me! Most of these houses can be seen in my LA vlogs over on my YouTube channel as they are mainly houses/buildings that can be found in some of your favourite films/tv shows!
My second shoot consisted of images that I had taken in Southampton. This showed images of transport in a city. I went and got pictures of cars, trains, boats, bikes and basically anything that moved! I thought Southampton was the perfect place to complete this shoot as it is such a busy city, with a variety of different types of transport.
My third shoot was based on reflection. I have done this many a time in photography projects as I think this is such a cool technique to use in images. Plus, I always pin images like this on pinterest as stuff that I want to take!
My fourth shoot is based on a photographic visual element, called angle of view. Essentially what this means is that you as a person are looking at the image from either above or below the subject. As I used buildings we are looking up at the buildings.
My final shoot is I think my favourite shoot of them all. This shoot was heavily inspired by Antony Zacharias. This shoot uses long exposures to take images of London. I really like this shoot and actually used lots of images from this shoot in my final pieces in my exam.
Sketchbook
Once again, I had to complete a sketchbook which acts as like a little journal of things that I have done and used to research for my images. I really left this to the last minute and basically finished it all within the last week before I had to hand this in!
Exam
For this project, there was a 15 hour exam. Now I did not sit this all at once! That would have been hell on earth and I would have got sooooo bored in that time! I did between 4 and a half and six hours for three weeks and in those three weeks I created some outcomes for my project. What this means is basically how I displayed them. Theses are some of the outcomes that I created over the course of the 15 hours. I mean, these things I did were ok, but I had completely lost my passion at this point and I was totally bored and did not see the purpose of doing this. To me photography is not about how you display them or the artists behind why you took the image. Photography to me is a way of artistically expressing myself and the surroundings around me and also making people smile. That is why I love photography.
There we have it, my last photography project. I think it’s fair to say that my last shoot that I did on land use really did bring back my passion for photography. I’ve been able to go on some recreational shoots since and I really enjoyed it. I even enjoyed the editing process. I would actually like to go on more shoots in the near future. Perhaps include people in my images? Maybe I should get some of my blogging friends to be my model? 😂 If you would like to see more of my A-Level Photography work then I did a post similar to this about my coursework project, which you can check out here.
