In this post, I am evaluating my work on the following aspects:
Target Audience, Cultural Context, Production and Reflection/Self Evaluation.
My photographs are based on the different styles of fashion that incorporates in Harlow College. I and some fellow students from my class decided to team up for a fashion shoot, basing the shoot around each of us and using other students from different courses. Looking back at my final photographs that I uploaded in the most previous post, I believe that my target audience is situated around 16-60 year olds. My reason as to choosing a wide age gap is because the college associates with mature students on various courses and, in addition to this fact, there are many members of staff who are middle aged and over. I like to think that students would appreciate these shots if they were to be published in various fashion targeted publications.
Within the entire shoot, it involved different cultural contexts (i.e. using students/models of different ethnicities). By incorporating this into the entire project, I feel it has proved to be popular choice due to the diverse races of the staff and students. For example, the second shot that I manipulated for my first evaluation shows two students/models of different ethnicities. Feedback from other students who were not involved in the fashion shoot, but examined our combined work, agreed with our perception of popularity of this shot. The negative feedback that I received from both other students and my tutor was that the whole project slacked in the fashion side of things and they believed that the project was more concentrated on social aspects of college. Looking back at every image that we as a group took, I do have to agree with the negative comments of how we concentrated on the social aspects and I feel us, and myself as an individual, could have made more of an effort to take a step back from
Looking back to our production and the way we handled our time management skills, our techniques of incorporating students from other courses and keeping to our deadlines for the entire project, I believe that we had made a satisfactory effort to keep on top of everything. However, from an individual perception, I feel that I did struggle with focusing on the whole. My reason for this is because I struggled to cooperate with the fashion shoot decisions. It surprised me at the time because I feel that I am a very creative and imaginative person and I could have made more of an effort to bring together my own ideas and see them in action. I did slack with time management when it came to developing our chosen three photos on Photoshop. The reason for this is because I was struggling to an extreme extent with the different functions on the program and I had difficulty in changing the colours of the background on each image. In addition, I do feel that there was not much support from our tutor at the time when it came to the Photoshop manipulations.
Taking everything into perspective, I am very pleased with the outcome of my final three Photoshop manipulations and the fashion shoot on the whole. There was a lot of creativity to the project and I was overwhelmed by the fact that people we approached from other courses were willing to take part in the project.
My abilities with Photoshop have proven to be very poor and my learning abilities to improve my Photoshop skills have also proved to be unsatisfactory. If I paid more attention in the Photoshop sessions, then I believe that I would have made a great success in the manipulations. It would have also boosted my self-confidence and I would have started to enjoy the sessions. On the plus side, I feel that I have learnt a lot about taking photographs from different angles to get the best shot. I have learnt different ways of shooting different genres of photographs and I am pleased I have incorporated photographic terminology in particular pieces of work on my blog.
I really enjoyed the fashion shoot task and despite the ups and downs when it came to the practical side of things, I feel I have made a good effort in all the related work.
