Mid Project Evaluation

At the beginning of my project, I had a strong concept for what I wished to communicate through my subject of hyperreality. I wanted to dive into the controversial aspects of the subject such as it's negative influence on the audience who are subjected to it. However, I did not tackle these big issues and themes until around shoot 5. I feel that while I like the concept of the shoots before this point, I feel that these heavy implications are among my stronger images, due to their powerful subject matter and visual appearance. My first shoots focused on using photoshop in order to take an ordinary setting and make it visually more exciting, by raising the saturation or forcing the audience to look at the image from a new perspective as I did with the miniatures shoot. I began to focus on contrast as a main theme within my images between the amazing world that the media constructs and the dullness of the real world in comparison. While this is a strong premise, I feel I have explored this theme enough and should tackle more challenging aspects of the subject and widen my photoshop skills. Compared to my current Photoshop knowledge, I was very limited in terms of the ways I knew how to translate different aspects of my work. To begin, I mainly focused on saturation and black and white in order to convey meaning within my images. In order to create some variation within my work and the areas explored within hyperreality I began to research different Photoshop methods and I began to consider the implications of these effects and how they might translate to my subject. Within the first portion of my work, my favourite to explore would be the shoots that challenged my Photoshop abilities more such as the miniatures and my airbrush portraiture shoot. Among the first five shoots, these are definitely the most visually dynamic, the latter especially is interesting due to its strong subject matter of body image and the implications of its use within the media.

As I continue through the year, tackling more shoots, I will consider more methods within programmes such as Photoshop that will continue to test my abilities. I now feel more confident with my abilities with cameras and Photoshop. I will consider what these effects can accomplish and signify, judging how they relate to the people within the image and the realm of hyperreality. At this point, I am looking into how images can be manipulated in Photoshop to enhance certain aspects. I have already analysed the impact of body image/manipulation within Photoshop, but I have also been looking how audiences can be manipulated by an image in order to feel a certain way about the subject of the image. I am looking to explore this through the use of colour and lighting, thinking about their connotations in order to make the audience feel strong emotions of distrust or sense emotions of anger and sadness within the frame. I will attempt to continue my journey into the themes of hyperreality, perhaps using elements such as contrast as a focus of the imagery, comparing the worlds generated by the media to reality. I would also like to bring in some more research aspects of my work into my shoots. I feel very inspired by the work of Staudinger Franke and Cedric Delsaux and I am sure I can find a way to take examples of their work such as Delsaux's Star Wars photography and Franke's Mohawk project and implement it into the subject of hyperreality.I feel that this will help add some more diverse imagery to my shoots.