A consolidated account of weeks 13 to 15, module four.

Week 13 – w/c Monday 08 January 2018

Building a website, a seemingly simple task!

Started in September, it has been a saga of trial and tribulation.

I had a very clear outcome in mind, a very definite look that I wanted for the website which would represent my photographic practice.

Having tried many options for ready-made, template-based websites, the experience has taught me that a website designed and up and running in minutes is nothing more than a marketing ploy.

WordPress has served me very well during the life of this CRJ – I am impressed. Nevertheless, I was unable to obtain the freedom I wanted to customise my website even with a self-hosted .org.

And to be honest, I quickly found myself out of my depth.

Be clear on this, WordPress is a very powerful application for the design of websites. Any constraints on my ability to customise were a direct result of a lack of knowledge on my part.

New Year’s Day 2018, I made the decision to tackle the issue which had plagued me for some months. Locked away for six days, I taught myself everything I needed to know to be able to use WordPress child themes.

The results of my efforts can be seen here:

http://philipmorrisphotography.com/

The website isn’t complete (will it ever be?) and is subject to further development.

It has received positive comments from peers and from Lynn Chambers (MAYN Creative).

I’m proud of this achievement and the website closely matches my original intention.

I think it gives me a very strong platform from which to build my photographic practice.

–

Very positive feedback was received from Amy Simmons, MC Saatchi, regarding the treatment I prepared (see Receiving Treatment). In summary, she felt that all the information contained in the treatment was correct with a nice level of detail.

Moving forward, Simmonds suggested that images which provide inspiration for one aspect of an image are placed together in one separate section, with a separate section being included in the treatment for each aspect, e.g. images relating to lighting, texture or background.

Additionally, images which are included for positional illustration should be labelled as such. Positional illustrations being favoured over mock-ups, the latter possibly placing a constraint on creativity by preventing the opportunity to experiment with different arrangements during the shoot.

Again, another achievement to feel positive about.

Week 14 – w/c Monday 15 January 2018

Results!

The effort has paid off.

I am very pleased with the results for the assignments submitted 15 December 2017.

These results build very nicely on earlier marks.

Looking back 12 months and there is a marked difference in the feedback provided by the academic staff – last year I was a mess, floundering.

I am looking forward to working on my final major project.

With regard to my project, the Christmas break was an opportunity to evaluate both concept and plans.

The result was a major rethink – the theme for my final major has changed quite significantly.

Initially, it was the intention to explore alcohol dependency. I think there is a lot of mileage in this theme as a project.

To be honest, the concept met with mixed reactions, but most were negative.

My revised plan is to explore what happens when our relationship with food becomes unhealthy – in this looking at anorexia.

Week 15 – w/c Monday 22 January 2018

Rejection is part of being a photographer – fact.

Nevertheless, it can be a very bitter pill to swallow.

There have been a lot of positives in recent weeks – positives that I can continue to build on. I don’t know if that made a rejection this week harder to accept.

Is it a major rejection? No, not by any means – but it still got under my skin.

Inspiration can come in many forms, and from many different areas.

‘Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody is going to hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.’

– Rocky Balboa

I don’t need to beat anyone else. I just need to conquer myself. Then, and only then, I will have beaten everything.

–

A very productive week, focussing on project planning. There is clearly a long way to go, the project is deliverable at the end of August, but I feel that the concept is quite developed.

Forward into module 5 …

‘Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.’

– Rene Magritte

‘The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.’

– David Bailey

‘My fashion pictures are documents just as much as my boat people or my pictures for Band-Aid of Sudan.’

– David Bailey

International Herald Tribune, 15 Nov 1985

‘We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.’

– Sam Abell

Creative treatment based on a brief set by Amy Simmons, M & C Saatchi.

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Details of brief:

‘This is for a European department store who is trying to break into the UK market, so that’s the client that you need to have in mind. The target market is UK shoppers, any gender aged 20 – 30.

The brief itself is a campaign about how people have intimate and personal relationships with inanimate objects. You should focus on an item of your choosing within the treatment. It can be clothing, a book, a piece of art, food, electronic item, basically, anything that someone might purchase in a department store.

You can do this in any way that you choose, this is a very open brief. It’s your interpretation of that, We do get briefs like this sometimes, where the art director doesn’t come up with a visual and they really leave it down to the photographer. You can take this in any direction that you so choose in terms of treatment and lighting. You could just do a simple still life or you could do something with cast or on location, as long as there’s a sense of affection that can be illustrated for that object. You really need to feel that someone loves that object, however you choose to interpret that.

This is a bit of a practical element to the brief: where is the copy going to sit on the image? It’s going to sit in the top left hand corner and will read ‘This -insert object here- is mine’, obviously that would be the name of whatever object you would choose. The copy will be in white, so you should have a darker space in the top left for legibility. The logo of the company will be in the bottom right. Those are some considerations you should talk about, how you would compose the shot and how you would keep those areas clean to ensure that both of those things are legible.

Treatment and lighting, as I mentioned. This company are commissioning a variety of different photographers who have totally different styles, so it is very much your take on the brief. Do it in your style, with visual references that inspire you.

Cast: if you think that you do want to use cast, obviously include some references of the sorts of people you are thinking of. They must look like they might genuinely own that object or item. If depicting multiple people, they should be a mix of ethnicities and the same age range as the target market.

If you are thinking about shooting on location, the location should be UK based but also this could be shot in a studio, it really depends on how you want to interpret the brief. I think one of the key factors will be making this object feel like the hero of the shot in some way.

Formats: this is a key point. The brief is just for one asset, so one shot, but it will be for a social media post. As I talked about earlier, please be aware in your treatment and maybe discuss how this image is going to work for the square crop for Instagram, the portrait crop for Snapchat, and the landscape crop for Facebook. Will you capture everything in one shot or would you compose the three different formats differently?’