So yeah, our first task with the new module was to take 100 pictures around Leeds of people, places, objects, textures and type. I was using my 8 Megapixel point-and-click, which has a broken display, so really all the images were guess work like using a film camera. Still, some of the images came out a bit, well... lame. So I used Photoshop to tweak them and make them look a bit more professional, here's a few examples for ye -
Original...
Edited...
Original...
Edited...
I spent hours going through every photo and editing it so it looked better because I figured 'Oh, well when we're in on Monday we'll probably have to select the best few' or something, and I didn't want to show up with a load of pants looking photography. Still, saves me editing them later on.
The next step was to take a theme from our pictures and elaborate on it through research, so I ended up choosing Smoking because I thought the end product to the research might be really interesting, like using cigarette ash to paint a picture of lungs or something. We needed to get 10 Primary sources of research and 10 Secondary sources of research. First, I created a survey and I wanted the results to give me a feeling or mood about smoking as well as statistical data, so I asked questions like 'How does it feel physically to be desperate for a cigarette?'
I also emptied the contents of my ash tray into a plastic sleeve so it'd give the texture and smell and everything. One of my secondary sources was a South African anti-smoking campaign i found on adsoftheworld.com, it had things like a 48 sheet on top of a tower block saying "Jumping from this building when pregnant may harm your baby" and the tagline "You wouldn't ignore this warning, so why ignore those on cigarette packets?" [http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/national_council_against_smoking_building_billboard]
Some of my photographic research into smoking:
After the smoking research, we were put into groups of four, I was with Liam, Chloe and Carl, and together we decided to research 'Melancholly' for the next brief, unfortunately I was in Watford for the Monday and Tuesday afterwards so I missed the beginning of the brief. When I got back the guys told me we were looking into S.A.D. - Seasonal Affective Syndrome, so I began looking into daylight emitting lamps and where S.A.D. is most prevalent and the like.
We later decided to do a photoshoot of ourselves dressed up in all the winter clothing we could fit on ourselves in the photography studio, before Liam edited them in Photoshop and I came up with a title and logo for us, 'It might never happen' - ie: Cheer up mate, it might never happen. Chloe said she'd like the logo to be similar to the United Colours of Benetton logo, so I tried to keep it in that sort of style, only, different.
In the end, I felt like although our work collectively was of a decent standard, and the photos came out quite professional-looking and all that, we failed to collate all the information we had and actually create a purpose for what we were doing. The posters we did [sadly they're on my account at Uni but I didn't have a USB Key with me to take them home...] looked decent, but how was it actually helping to combat S.A.D.?
