Photo by Holly Webb

 

In reflection of this week’s task, I believe that although some of the work was done to a standard that I am proud of, I could have improved in other areas.

Firstly, we started editing our images in Photoshop and Lightroom. I enjoyed this as I was proud of the image I had taken, meaning that I had the chance to improve it even more and finally see a product I was proud of.

To see my before and after images, click here.

We then had to include these edited images in an article written for Leeds Hacks.

To read my article for Leeds Hacks, click here.

I found this part harder, as I don’t believe my story was very strong. Although I had had a nice conversation with ‘Rat’ – the subject of my photos and article – I don’t believe I had enough to form a strong story from it.

Because of this, I had to look online and read other people’s comments on him to form parts of my article. Although this turned out fine, next time I will be sure not to come away so soon, and with solid content.

I will be sure to not leave so soon as I could have wasted my time if my few comments couldn’t be strung into a story at all!

 

What I did well:

• I think the image works well with the story I had, and I am very proud of the image I got – you seem to get a sense of who ‘Rat’ really is without having to read the story at all, which I am very happy with
• Even though I could have got better content for the story, I am happy with how I approached it, with confidence and professionalism to speak to and get photos of a complete stranger
• I think my editing skills improved the picture and portrayal of my subject well, I look forward to experimenting with other pictures in the future

 

Improvements:

• I wish I had got more photos to choose from – next time I will be more prepared with storage on my camera and take lots of images so that I have a choice of which to edit
• If I were to do this again, I would have stayed longer with my subject to push for a more interesting story. I felt as though he talked to me happily, I didn’t push for a newsworthy story, and could have come away with something a lot stronger

 

My Project:

This session was very useful in preparation for my project. I really enjoyed the editing sessions, and am more confident in the post-production process that I will be using a lot when creating the images for my project. It has definitely boosted my confidence and got me more excited for producing my final images.

Luckily, I already have the Adobe software on my laptop, meaning I can now spend some time at home practicing editing more photos – JPEG and RAW. In my project, I want all of my images to tell one story and for there to be obvious cohesiveness, meaning that over the next few weeks I would like to practice achieving this with other photos.

 

Aims for this week:

• take more photos (JPEG and RAW)
• practise street photography, perhaps even repeating this task one more time
• practise documentary portraiture – ask siblings etc. to be my subject, to experiment more with aperture and camera settings
• play around with post-production software with these images, and start to edit RAW format
• write post on progress, showing before and after JPEGs and RAWs