Evaluation of my project

On the whole, I feel I have completed this project successfully and have produced 7 final prints that bring together my inspirations and motives from my blog. I have enjoyed studying this project as I feel I have explored and expressed my personal life within my work more than usual, as the project title was so open to personal interpretation. I chose to look at my childhood and how I used to perceive my ‘home’ and the environment in which I grew up. I believe the innovation of using a blog to document our work from the start to finish was a very good idea as I had always thought about getting my own blog after looking through other people’s blogs and enjoying seeing their ideas and visual inspirations but had not ‘got round to it’ myself. Therefore, this project made me start my own blog and I believe the amount and depth of research I have done has shown that this method of documenting is successful for me, in contrast to my usual folder or sketchbook. I am very regularly on the internet throughout the day so the convenience of my work being online proved hugely useful and rather than creating a document with pasted images, annotating, printing and arranging in a folder, I saved much more time using links and importing pictures and videos into my blog.
I experienced a few problems with the arrangement of the photo shoot, firstly arranging suitable times for both me and my model, (however this was made easier by having our Easter break in the middle of the project) but using the weather forecast to plan times also proved difficult while illness forced me to cancel our first shoot. However, we managed to rearrange for later in the week. The little amount of wind proved difficult with flying the kite but we managed for a short while. My model, Niamh, has been photographed a couple of times by her friends studying Photography at Staffordshire University, so she felt comfortable in front of the camera and needed very little direction of what I wanted to achieve.
Even though the project is for fashion photography, I wanted to make the actions of my model and the environment of the shoot more important than the clothing. Therefore, I used the same outfit throughout with only a change of footwear from flat pumps to wellingtons when it was necessary. I think this is accentuated by the style of the images being almost a snapshot aesthetic, implying that while children were playing in the fields and the puddles, they could have been taking photographs of each other and their adventures using an instant or Polaroid camera. Although my final photographs do not look like Polaroid images, they do have a slightly dark tint from the printing process with a slightly grainy aesthetic which I find attractive and is usually an outcome of the photographs of an instant camera. I wanted (and feel I have achieved) the natural beauty of the environment to be the focus and I feel the printing has added to the effect I wanted, to mainly show the un-styled landscape, a natural model and the nostalgia of my childhood.