Christmas Project

Over the Christmas holiday, we were all set a task to complete. Due to a mishap however, I got set the wrong brief so I ended up doing something completely different than everyone else, but what I did for my brief is decent nonetheless.

My brief was to take some photographs that "capture[s] an aspect of what remains" after Christmas. The aftermath, if you will. Luckily, I was going to a shopping centre on boxing day, so I thought that that would be a great opportunity to get some shots. In the brief it says that it might be interesting to get an empty shopping mall, but I thought that the contrary would be better with the boxing day sales, to show that the rush of consumerism never ceases. The brief also asks to work with camera angles, framing, close ups, mid shots, far shots, and lighting. I ended up working mostly with camera angles and lighting.

I also wanted to try a different style of lighting than I usually use. Most of the time I rely on natural and/or flash light for my photographs but I thought it would look great if I tried to introduce some unnatural light to spice things up a little. One of my favourite photographers who's work I've been following for a while now uses this technique in some series that he does. Benoit Paille uses a light with a colour filter when taking photographs so that it is lit with different, unexpected colours. I managed my own effect like this in my own... special way. I had received a couple of Quality Street chocolates the day before on Christmas, and as we all know, most of them come with this translucent, coloured plastic that wraps up the sweet. I basically used these as a flash filter. This only really worked to a certain extent, and it didn't really work in the same way as Paille's method. Since Benoit uses a light separate to his camera, he can control the direction that the light goes in. however, I just covered my camera flash with the thin coloured plastic secured by a elastic band, so the coloured light is very direct and flat, unfortunately.

The camera that I used was a film DSLR, so I ended up with some very clear, sharp images. The film that I used was Kodacolor 200 35mm, which is a great film by itself. The grain is very fine (but it's still there which is one of the reasons I use film in the first place), and the colours that this film has are very saturated.

Overall, I think the photos were pretty decent. The quality was nice, the colours are fantastic, and the film I used provided a nice grain that is quite appealing to me. There were a couple of photos that I don't really like at all, like the photo of the plants or the snowflakes. Also, the quality street wrapper filter that I used, like I predicted, didn't really work. It just made the light really flat. If I used a directional light or a separate flash then it would have looked a lot better. I just used what I had though.

Another part of this project is that we needed to arrange the photographs into groups, to make the weaker images stronger in the context of those groups. I feel like this exercise worked really well. The plant photograph that I don't like particularly well looks better next to the photographs that I grouped it with. Below is the photographs in their groups.