Summer Project 1

After establishing what the project was and what it might entail I decided to mind map my ideas to help me plan what theme I might focus on for my Mobile Photo shoot:

The idea which I liked the most was Urban Landscape because I felt like this really related to me as there was so much building work happening where I live. Also I though it was the idea which best suited the brief because not many people would think to use there mobile phone to take pictures of something so ugly as building sites so therefore by me doing this deliberately I am reinstating the purpose of photography by using it to show the sadness of the changing landscape. Here is my contact sheets from the shoot:

I then went through my images and reviewed them back at home. After consideration I chose what I think are my best 12:

In this image I am trying to show the blend between nature and man made objects with in the landscape. I have used a fish eye attachment on my phone camera to create  a distorted effect. 

Again I have still used the fish eye lens to distort the image. This  distortion mirrors how the man made objects have distorted the natural landscape.

This image is almost like a documentation image showing a structure in progress. I really like the lines created by the scaffolding. Again I have distorted it using the fish eye lens.

I have used a metal and mesh fencing in this image to capture the silhouettes of the buildings on the other side. The fencing almost works  like a filter on obscuring the houses behind it.

In this image you will notice that the building in the background are lit up and very bright. However the natural foreground of the tress and bushes are in darkness. I think this shows well how houses are taking over.

Here I have used the natural water in this puddle as a mirror to reflect the fences and building to the viewer. This is to show how ugly they are in natures eyes.

I have played with focus in this image to cause an effect. I have put the focus on the fence to add a prison bar pattern to an already ruined landscape. This reflects how this modern culture is trapping us.

This image has the trees farming the house in the centre. This almost shows them to both be appearing on the skyline like they are both growing.

Here I have captured an urban landscape from afar but I have let some of the nature show in the background of the image. This symbolises how we are loosing nature.

Again I have used the symbolism of the fence to show how trapped we are with all this urbanisation. I also really liked the bold lines the fence creates.

I have used symmetry when capturing this image. The symmetry draws your focus to the centre of the frame. This is where you see the ruined pathway already destroyed by tire marks. This shows the instability of the urban world.

This panorama which I created on my phone shows a comparison between natural landscape which you can see on one side and urban landscape which you can see on the other.

Project 1 Evaluation and Analysis - Urban Landscape Reality:

After brainstorming I decided to go with my urban landscape idea because I felt that this theme would defiantly reinstate the purpose of photography the most. When people use their phones to capture images they always focus just on the positives and edit there lives on social media by only posting what they want people to see and think about their life. Therefore mobile phone cameras are never used to capture and demonstrate reality. This is why I took a documentary themed approach to mine by going out into the areas surrounding my house shooting the landscape how it was presented to me. These areas use to be natural landscapes but as you can see from the images I captured it is now being transformed into an urban landscape. I feel like most my images show this transformation successfully especially the ones where it clearly shows the combination between nature and man-made features.

As much as I like documentary photography I wanted to show my opinion through some of the images as well by distorting them as a reflection on how the building work is distorting the natural world. I did this through a clip on fish eye lens stuck to my mobile phone camera. It made images which would be very plain suddenly become very distorted which hopefully draws even more attention to the ugliness of the building which people seem to have become immune to noticing. I feel like I could however develop this idea further by finding other ways to distort the images to make the message even clearer. I could try using other objects such as marbles and glasses to create more lenses and effects.

I feel like my collection of images shows a strong theme and meets the criteria of the project but because it focuses on a place that’s very personal to me and because it’s demonstrating my opinions I don’t know how many people will relate to my work. However I wouldn’t change it and instead would rather just keep developing it as I want people to see how the world is changing. I didn’t edit the images at all in post-production as I wanted them to be the reality of what was there in front of me. I feel like I have created a mixture of images, some of which are documentation of the landscape and could be interpreted in a variety of ways, others which I have deliberately distorted during capturing them to show my opinion. I think I need to separate the sets of images to keep my opinions strong and the documentation reliable. I am proud however of how each final image is strong in itself portraying the theme in each.