Stage 9 - Your first shoot

 So now you're in to the fun bit...

From here onward you start to shoot images. One of the key things in these assignments is that you show development. Development is basically improvement and it can be either...

•  The idea improving and becoming more coherent.
• Your practice improving - getting better at all the Photography elements.

Each practical activity needs to be better in some way than the previous.

Task 1________________________________________________________________

• Write your plan (Blue section below) 
• With your DSLR (Ideally) as it means you're actually learning at this stage how to use the camera, go out and photograph a bunch of ideas for decay, just shoot all sorts. *You could use your previously shot images at this stage, but the main objective is to look at a range of potential ideas.
• Get the images into your design sheet and then reflect on it (Yellow section below) 

The work will generally look like this... 

When you shoot your images, always shoot lots and try different ways of doing it, from above, from the side, close up, with different lenses/focal lengths. Shoot more than you need, as this gives you options and allows you to make decisions about whether each shoot in your design sheet takes up 1, 2 or more pages. (There's not an upper limit). Typically, 2 or 3 pages is fine.

The section that is High-lighted Blue is your plan and the part at the end that is highlighted yellow is the Gibbs Reflection. This same approach should be applied to work done in the dark-room and when you work with Photoshop in conjunction with a project. Here you can see the plan - do - reflect in action.

Each subsequent shoot or activity you do that follows this will be laid out the same - plan at the start, images of your work and activities followed by a reflection. In this example, there's no annotations with the images, but if you want to add annotations you can do, but I would keep them short, generally the commentary and analysis is in the Gibbs reflection. *Note the Gibbs reflection can be longer than this example. 

Below is another way of doing the same thing, but using 4 columns...

This 4 column approach is far more image heavy and looks very busy and if you feel it might work for you there's no reason that you can't adopt it. See the link in the side bar or simply ask me for a copy of the template. There's no reason you can't mix and match using the 4 column design sheets for some of the work and the 3 column for others. The only thing I would advise is that you start a new design sheet each time and bring all the work together at the end at the PDF stage. I wouldn't advise adding a 3 column to a 4 column in the same file. 

Unit 03 Important notice re 'Development'

With Unit 03 this first shoot needs to be a whole range of different subjects, showing that you've explored and visually researched the theme decay in a general way. What you should then do is look at what you've shot and make a decision with regards what you'll now focus on and develop further.

Keep in mind that you'll probably have to go back to your subject several times to develop and improve the images, so, if some of your initial images involved having to go miles to shoot them, you might want to consider shelving those ideas if it's not going to be practical. 

Another thing you might do is work on two or more ideas if you can't make your mind up which one you like the best, so with this set of images seen above, I might look at rusty cans, leaves and drinks cans again in far more detail before deciding which one to go with. This creates a lot more work, which isn't a bad thing as you'll learn lots, but it's not necessarily the best thing to do.