Collections: Evaluation

As I chose not to produce a book for this project, my evaluation is more free form than in response to the questions posted online.

To begin with, I really wasn’t looking forward to this project and I was quite confused about what we actually had to produce when it was first presented. I know that I want to focus on photography for the remainder of the course and having made a book over the summer, I wasn’t too keen on producing yet another one. Instead, I chose to produce a collection of photographs of waterfalls in the Yorkshire Dales.

I felt that majority of my research was fairly standard for landscape photography. I investigated locations asking neighbours and friends who have lived here for a long time if they know of anywhere, but I found the majority of locations using OS maps. I searched on Flickr for images of each waterfall so I could see how suitable the location was and monitored the weather quite closely before setting off to photograph each fall. I also looked at other photographers who shoot landscape and coastal images with long exposures as well as researching the technique itself.

In term of materials, skills and processes, mine were quite different as I didn’t produce a traditional book. I did learn more about using mirror lock up functions on my camera but I also learnt more about colour space for printing and the post production side with photoshop.

The narrative was very simple, showing a journey around the Dales which is why I used a wide variety of my final images. I tried to make the selection more interesting by showing a varied selection of falls in terms of shapes, styles and colours.

As I was looking for quite a simple informative approach, I think my project worked well. All I really wanted to do was learn a new skill and show people that these beautiful waterfalls are fairly close to their doorstep. Just because we live in a city, doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything else out there and I felt that my series of images showed that well.

Generally, I am quite good at managing my time, setting goals and working on my own initiative as I have had plenty of experience through previous employment. For the first part of the project, I looked at other photographers and I researched potential locations and then photographed them quite early on. This is because I knew that the processing side would take quite a lot longer to do as well as collecting feedback for which I used Flickr as I don’t feel that I get a great deal out of the crit sessions at uni in terms of how I could improve my images. I also use a diary to plan my time as efficiently as I can.

I really enjoyed this project once it got going but I would have liked more time to visit more waterfalls. The main problem that I encountered was the weather as long exposures can be very difficult in the wrong conditions.