Evaluation

The last ever evaluation for the year. It's been an absolute pleasure to be working over the past two years. I couldn't have ended the year with a better project and I feel very content with the work that I've put in and the results I got with my final pieces. A lot of this will be missed and it's so surprising that it's all over. As I've mentioned in my darkroom folder, I'll be never setting myself in the darkroom again nor will I have any more long evaluations to write up.

Final Major Project has been absolutely fun and besides all the stress, I think it's been such a good experience with picking our own genres and then doing all the tasks independently. I feel like I've really pushed my boat out in this project and wanted to do something new and different. The name of the project is called viewpoint and after weeks of trying to figure out what I want to do, I finally figured out that my genre will be street photography. Viewpoint has inspired me with my idea because the theme I was working along was capturing the essence of West Yorkshire, where I capture candid shots of people and the lifestyle. I've already mentioned this, but it's my viewpoint that I've experienced here when I moved two years ago. To document that change, I think this project has done the idea justice because I feel like I managed to portray the lifestyle and people as best as I could naturally - without staging anything whatsoever.

Research in this project was very helpful because I got to look at other work and then get an idea of the different genres and see what would be best for me. I managed to do really well with my research with finding both historical and contemporary photographer or artists. The moodboards were also very distinctive and just helped me with categorising each genre in a simple manner so I knew exactly what each genre was about. Once I knew what I was doing, I did further research which was seriously the key factor to how my project ended. I feel like I've learned a lot and went in depth with the genre. This was all done just to ensure I understood what it meant to myself and that I have my own style when it comes to my images.

Primary Research may have not been exactly what I ended up doing, but I feel like it wasn't completely useless. It gave me the insight of editing similarly to the research that influenced me, and it also just gave me the courage to decide what I will do, then just cracking on with it. I remember the task so well as I picked something different from everyone who mostly went with 'landscape' so I was pleased that immediately at the start of the project, my work stood out and I got great feedback from everyone which motivated me to continue.

Presentation was not scary at all, I believe over this course I've been getting very comfortable with doing presentations in class and I feel quite confident while doing it. In this project, I felt like the review came quicker than I expected and I wasn't too sure on what I was doing but even then I was confident in presenting my ideas and just being myself. I know I overthink all the time but after this, I started to really figure out exactly what I will be doing. I just knew in this moment of time like I've mentioned that I will be doing a visual photo book if it would work out, and now I can say that it has for sure.

Shoots was great fun in this project. It was a whole new experience with shooting candid because it was happening so fast and there was a new level of adrenaline. I believe that I put so much effort when it came to the shoots as I managed to do 5 excluding the signage work. I also used a whole new set of lens which I've never done in any previous projects, and it was just so fun to do because it was a complete new and different experience in comparison to every project I've done previously.

Film photography and darkroom has gone really well in this project because I managed to get good shots and then use the darkroom to print lots of work. I analysed everything in my folder and even documented the technical sides such as the timing and the grades. It has been different to what I was doing for digital but it's because it's hard to just click the shutter on here and take an image. I made every shot count and even did extra with the colour film. I think I got quite a few film images and it's been a pleasure to work in the darkroom for the last time.

Experimentation has been quite frequent in this project and I've been doing experiments with film prints in the darkroom and also with digital and the editing. My intentions for digital is to get similar looking images with the edits and I believe I did achieve that well. The darkroom experiments were techniques we've done before and thought I'd revisit those and have a few in this project. These experiments were fun to do and I feel like it's something I could have done more of. I just felt like in this case, I didn't want to experiment too much and I wanted to keep things as they were because I liked the documented style and didn't want to change the realness out of my images.

Final pieces have gone down a treat, using the best edited images from my shoots, I created well and thoughtful final pieces which I've gone over in the post. I won't say too much again except that I believe I did push my boat here and did everything professionally from printing to mounting. I believe my target audience is for people who is into street photography or likes social documentary and I believe my final does fit nicely with my audience in different formats. Not only do I believe that my target audience has been met with my images, I believe that anyone looking at my images can relate to what they see and some will have their own interpretation based on their life experience living up North. I think that is the biggest achievement because I set out there to shoot, and I got images that interact with my target audience. I also put a lot of thoughts and considerations with what I am doing for my finals and what I'm trying to achieve so I quite like how it all came together.

So that's the end of the final major project. The last ever project. It's been a pleasure.