Final Project

 Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4Picture 5

For my final project on this photography module I chose to do Synchronicity. For my project I wanted to tackle things that are visually pleasing to look at, things that satisfy us when looking at them. There are a lot of videos and photos that surface around social media of satisfying things, such as sand that has been taken right out of the box and carefully cut into equal parts. This is nice to look at, however since that is a moving image it can be a bit harder to capture satisfying things on camera and can cost a lot of money getting these objects for one photo only to possibly never use it again. The camera I used was one of my own, a Canon 1300D with an 18-55mm lens and using a 128GB SD card.

My first approach to this project was to put together objects and create something satisfying, using references from the internet. A British sculptor by the name Tom Cragg created a cube made from various objects such as waste, paper, cardboard, books etc. He would have to pack it up and rebuild it every time he would go to a convention. With my limitations of objects, equipment and space, making a massive cube and capturing it would be very time consuming and unnecessary. I improvised by using playing card boxes and tried making a cuboid out of it (since the boxes are rectangle) but the images weren’t satisfying to me, and I felt if it isn’t satisfying for me to look at then I doubted that the audience would feel any. But I kept the image in case the theme of my project began to make sense. My next image was simply colours in order overlapping each other, I looked at it and felt instantly inspired to focus more on colour than objects.

The set from picture one is different from pictures 2-5 because when I took the 1^st picture I was back in my home city, my brother who is studying photography in college set up a mini photography set for his work, I took the advantage and used the set. It was done using black card to put up against the wall and then another one where the object rests, I was glad that the background was black because the background I had in mind when I went back to Lincoln would also be black, so there wouldn’t be any continuity errors on my project. The light was just a simple desk light, the brightness could not be altered so I had to physically move it closer or further away if I wanted the brightness of the image high or low as well as changing the ISO settings. The other images were shot in my accommodation and the background was done using my desk chair, I had LED Lights booked out so I used that to light up the set because the colour red and purple did not blend well with the black background because it struggled to be visible on camera, I tried repositioning the darker colours so that they were closer to the light but it made no difference. I then lowered the brightness of the light and used my flash but then the colours became over exposed, so I kept with the full powered brightness and just take a few shots and hoped the change of positioning would help light up the darker colour.

I liked how the light is reflected off some of the colours in picture one because I feel it does well to blend in with all the colours and gives out a warm feeling because of the colour of the light, whereas the light used in the others gives out a much cooler feeling than the first image.

I experimented different positions and even using different objects instead of just using coloured pens. I tried to stack M&M’s using one colour for the base then one colour for the next layer etc. It wouldn’t work because it would keep falling apart, instead I did the similar thing to the red coloured pens and lined them up from the brightest to the darkest red because red is one of my favourite colours and is visually pleasing to me and is a popular colour to many of people because physically it ‘increase enthusiasm, stimulates energy and can increase the blood pressure, respiration, heartbeat, and pulse rate, encourages action and confidence and provides a sense of protection from fears and anxiety’ (Sensational Colors, 2013). I felt M&M’s would be an interesting object to use because of the fact they come in different sizes and colour and I wanted to focus on the colour aspect and show that you can use everyday treats into visually pleasing things.

I did a reference to the complementary colour wheel where colours blend well depending what the colour opposite is, such as red and green. Using the coloured pens, I recreated that wheel and was impressed with the black line that is on the pens because it almost makes a perfect circle near the centre. This image was my favourite image out of the 5 I had taken because I feel I did well setting up the colours into the correct order and spreading them equally so that the finest detail such as the black line on the pens would be aligned.

The problems that I have encountered in the photos is the focus and depth of field of these images, this may be because of the black background or possibly because of my poor lens choices, I tried manual and auto focus to see if it made any difference to the quality of the photos but I think the manual focus did a lot better than the auto focus because I could focus it as well as I could myself instead of letting the camera try and potentially fail. For the future I will consider different lens and what would be the best ones for the different types of projects I do in the future and what will make my images stand out a lot more and a lot better than this year’s work.

Sensational Color (2013) All about the color RED. New York: Sensational Colors. http://www.sensationalcolor.com/color-meaning/color-meaning-symbolism-psychology/all-about-the-color-red-4344#.WteiXIjwY2y (Accessed 10^th April 2018)