I have picked these final images because together they best represent the idea that I ended my project with. I wanted my final pieces to go well in a set together to my the end of my project to look strong and collected to finish with. The reason I wanted this was because at various points in the project I think the images didn't look like they fitted together under the same theme, which then made me worry about the strength of my idea.
These images all represent my idea of the car imprint really well, with the viewer being able to see the imprint clearly in all of them. These images all have the same saturated effect to them so they will pop off the wall if displayed in a series together. For my final images I'm going to print them off in A3 on a high gloss paper to bring out the colours and vibrancy as much as possible. These will then lie in my portfolio archive box with the link to this blog to provide the reflective journal to go alongside the images.
Evaluation
My initial idea for my project on Looking at Place came from being given and area to photograph from my lecturer. At the start of my project I had no idea what my idea was going to be or what I was going to photograph so I decided to go to my area which was Swinton and just walk around and photograph anything that looked interesting to me. After this first shoot, I looked through all the images I had taken and my tutor suggested I put them into three different style categories which also have an artist for each category which represents the style of that specific category. After splitting them into these different groups, the Andreas Gursky images would have to be forgotten because there was nothing behind the idea. But I like the work of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, so I decided to merge their ideas and focus my idea on photographing areas that have fallen unnoticed from the public gaze. I joined the ideas by looking at these ram-shackled areas but also how the public interact with them, using Eggleston's work to inspire that element of my idea. After doing another shoot I looked at the work of Ole Birkeland who's techniques of using a high contrast in colours within his images to make them look surreal can be seen in my final piece's. I then starting looking at photography and narrative and how one could photograph something which is a result of a past event, but the viewer can only see the result of this which makes them think about what would've happened. After photographing car tire marks on the road I decided that this was going to be the route my project followed. The last photographer I looked at was Edward Burtynsky who photographed the affect of man on the environment, this connected really well with my idea of photographing the affects of man from car tire marks on the road. After another shoot I realised that these marks were also being made in the grass all around the estate that I was photographing, so I decided to focus my idea on car imprints in grass. These images looked really surreal because the cars shouldn't be driving on the grass, the surrealist affect connected my work with my previous ideas of photographing places that have fallen out of the publics gaze because these areas also had surreal aspects to them, this connected the end of my work with the start nicely. Furthermore, to increase the surreal element of my photographs, I increased the colour contrast using Birkeland as inspiration.
If i were to do the project again I think I would set out with an initial idea of what I was going to photograph and why because I like my images to have a reason behind them. Instead of just figuring out the reason as I go. Skills that I have learnt from this experience are firstly the act of taking a project which has no idea/ point behind it and developing it into a series of images that have a strong connection and idea behind them. Another skill I developed is looking closer at scenes that are seen in everyday life to see the unusual in the usual, and then highlight these unusual aspects in my photography.