Evaluation.

The brief of this project was very open. Titled 'The Personal Project', this was our opportunity to present whatever work we wanted to, something that appealed to us personally and didn't have to relate to a specific theme, obviously we would have to produce build up work and explore a range of ideas but the subject matter of our photographs and how we enhanced them and presented them was left up to us, I felt it was a really good topic because we could show our personalities in our work and produce was we desired to.

The project evolved very well for me, I explored a range of digital experiments on photoshop to dramatically enhance my photographs and I also recreated the darkroom experiments which I had enjoyed most from the last project, for example handmade negatives but this time putting them onto my photographs. The journey started quite easily because of dress up days in college I had opportunities to photograph fellow students in fairy tale costumes relating to the fashion theme I was continuing from the last project out of choice. My theme this time I felt was made much more obvious because of the over the top costumes which worked very effectively in creating something fantastical which was what I had wanted to do since starting photography. 

I looked at digital photographers such as Viona, Beate Pischl and Annie Leibovitz, mixed media photographers such as Bec Wonders and I also looked at darkroom work by Wawi and Idris Khan. I felt that the first load of photoshop work and experiments I did were purely for ideas and prior to the journey, I felt the journey truly began when I focused a lot on presenting my work in ways which they had done and combining more than one way of doing this together to see how it would look, this method worked well for me because often these combinations worked but even if they didn't, I could put my own twist on them which would give a personal outlook on thew result as well as showing inspiration from various photographers. For example, when I painted the mouths on my Alice in Wonderland photographs (inspired by Wonders) I felt it looked too plain and from also trying reticulation of my negatives, even though it was unsuccessful I imagined the outcome to be quite crackled and shattered, because of this image in my head of the shattering (also inspired from the photoshop tutorial I did on shattered glass) I decided to cut up my photographs and arrange them in a shattered way, this then led me onto mixing the photographs with other photographs. I felt at the start that this could be a final outcome but after seeing how unsuccessful it looked in terms of presentation and relevance it decided to move onto producing larger scaled blurred photographs inspired by Khan. The journey continued by me personally deciding to rearrange these blurs on various pieces of photographic paper and presenting them as one composition speed onto various sheets with the same photograph blurred, this was technically too difficult and didn't give me the most accurate results in the darkroom because of the tonal different win the blurs looking like they were wrong and out of place rather than intentional. 

For what I then didn't know would due my final idea, I decided to produce one largely scaled blurred photograph and one unblurred one of the same photograph and I began mixing them around to see how many blurs worked best. I felt that paint splatters could work well with the photograph and began looking at Jackson Pollock and combining his styles of splatters with my Khan inspired blurs. Out of personal taste I also put handprints in paint on them to see if this would make them visually more interesting or too crowded, I liked the result. I felt that one large version of these wasn't enough for a final so I produced 3. I still wanted to take this further by adding another personal touch of collaging. I wanted this for more colour and more enhancing. The prints were all split into four because of there being no large paper so i decided to link the Alice in Wonderland narrative and present each piece as a different colour looking tiled and vibrant. I experimented with various colours and chose was worked best. I also presented Khan styled work by scanning my images onto coloured or tracing paper (to collage with) and rescanning them in a different position to create blurs even more. The surreal look of parts of the photograph being collaged related to the Alice film too.

I felt that my final outcome went well but the one problem was the time I had to do it, I spent a lot of the time limit experimenting and had this been a real timed exam I would not have finished in time, next time I will know to be more prepared and ready. I felt that my experimentation work went very well and did help lead up to my final being much better. I feel that the placing of my photograph fragments used for the collaging could have been printed and placed more accurately, although I do not feel this ruins the piece because it is only very slightly out of place. I am happy with my final outcomes and feel that they sit well together, I am happy I chose the same colour scheme for the collaging on each photograph because I feel this has stopped it from becoming too busy and over powered.

Overall I enjoyed this project, I feel that because of the previous project involving so many experiments (some of which I like some I didn't) I felt much more clear on what to do again and what to avoid, also how to take these even further and have a clearer mind on what to explore to create a successful outcome. My opportunities to take photographs of such advanced costumes that were so full of effort also really helped with my narrative and subject matter, also the presentation of the fashion within them.