Architectural Photography - Statement of Intent

Assignment Title

The Man Made World

Professional Application

There are a number of professional applications of architectural photography, including photographs of prestigious buildings that have been built by civil engineering companies, and suppliers to the projects, who wish to promote their involvement in the project in their portfolio to future customers.Although in recent years, some advertisers are using photography of large famous buildings to promote a number of consumer goods, especially where the items are large, where the intention is to emphasise the larger size of the product. Other applications include estate agents who wish to advertise their catalogue of available premises, companies who wish to include photographs of both the inside and outside of their premises for advertising literature. Also, heritage organisations use photographs of buildings in their care to the public to promote the buildings for visits and events to raise money for their up keep.

Intention

My intention with this photographic project is to capture some of the beauty of some of the buildings in my travels, with a special emphasis on some of the buildings in Burton Upon Trent, to capture some of the older buildings in the town, which, to me, stand out from the others.

Purpose of this Project

The purpose of this photography is two fold. Firstly, I want to explore the contrast between the older buildings and some of the newer buildings in the built up world in my photography. Secondly, I would like to take photographs of some of the buildings in Burton Upon Trent before they one day disappear.

Stimulus

The stimulus for this project originally started after I saw some old photographs of Burton Upon Trent, showing how it looked at the turn of the century.  Seeing these I realised how much Burton had changed.  So I wanted to capture some of the current buildings for my record. Looking around, I noticed how some buildings had their own style, some have their own personality, where as others looked ugly !

Inspirations

What has inspired me for this particular project is some photographs of buildings that stand out from the others in the way that they use light and shadow to make a building look more interesting. Also where I have seen photographs of classic, and sometimes famous buildings, that really show the building in it’s glory or from an unusual angle.

Techniques and Equipment

For this project I want to build on some of the techniques, for example using the natural light to it's best, that I learnt during the landscape photography project. One technique that I will be using for this particular project is to try to prevent the converging verticals that ruin many photographs of famous buildings. For this project I will be using  the Pentax I will be using the 18 - 200 mm lens.

Macro Photography - Statement of Intent

Assignment Title

Nature's Beauty

Professional Application

The professional applications of this type of photography includes nature publications, both internet based and commercial magazines.  With the increase in people's interest in nature and conservation, partly due to television programmes (for example David Attenborough's series 'Life'), close up images of the natural world are becoming more widely used.  Although in recent years, some advertisers are using macro photography to promote a number of consumer goods, especially where the items are small, where the intention is to emphasise the small size of the product.

Intention

My intention with this photographic project is to explore the beauty of nature, in a way that is often missed because of the way we see things, especially in today's busy world where we rarely have time to look and see a lot of the world around us. But where I want differ from some macro photographers, is that I do not want to concentrate on spiders and other insects, because I feel that there is more to the micro world than insects, like nature's architecture which can be seen in the construction of a simple leaf.

Purpose of this Project

The purpose of this photography is two fold. Firstly, I want to explore this micro world that we never see and try to capture this world in my photography. Secondly, I would like to take forward some of the techniques that I learnt during my last photographic project, product photography, by taking it outside and into the natural world where you cannot control everything, unlike in a photographic studio.

Stimulus

The stimulus for this project originally started after I took some photographs in our garden, after some rain had stopped, basically to try out a macro mode on my Fujifilm Finepix S7000 bridge camera, which has two macro modes one being supermacro mode where the camera is supposed to focus down to 25mm. With the rain drops still on the leaves, I liked how they refracted the light, in the same way as a glass lens does.  This started me looking more at this area of photography, but only as an interest.  This interest became reignited when I was looking at product photography.

Inspirations

Something that has inspired me is some of the early photographs that I took to try out some camera options, together with seeing some of the nature programmes on television, having grown up with seeing Jacques Cousteau, an underwater film maker and explorer, who brought the wonders of the undersea world into millions of homes, and some of nature programmes. Since I took those original photographs, I have been inspired to look at what other photographers have been photographing, but I chose not to cover insects as I feel these are only part of the unseen world, and that sometimes people have concentrated too much on these.

Techniques and Equipment

For this project I want to build on some of the techniques that I learnt during the product photography project, but working outside in natural light as much as possible. How I want to capture these photographs is in a way that the viewer can see the world that is often missed, because it is so minute and cannot be easily seen, but this is another unseen world, that I feel people should see, and that is what I want the viewer to see, and then often they look closer, like I did, to what they see in their daily life. For this project I will be using a combination of both cameras, with the Pentax I will be using the 18 - 200 mm lens, which has a macro facility, which would allow me to use the power and facilities of the Pentax camera with the macro ability of the lens. To use natural light as much as possible I may use reflectors to bounce light, where it would otherwise not reach.