Mid-Project Evaluation

At the beginning of the project, I intended to present the romance and intimacy of my relationship through a documentary-style portfolio. A little later on this developed into presenting our relationship to present to the current youth that pure love is still possible. This is because the current generation are hopeless romantics and are desperately seeking out to find that pure and real love with another person. They are yet to realise that looking for love is not successful and many are left with broken hearts and unrealistic expectations of what to have in a relationship. The idea of love has changed over the years and the previous generation were a lot more successful in discovering love because they weren't affected by the standards of social media and constant publication of other romances. Because of this research and realisation I made, I wanted to present a documentary presented to the current generation that this love is possible but looking for it is not the answer.

So far I have taken six shoots and researched into three photographers for inspiration. I have focused on collecting a variety of different composition styles for my final portfolio because I feel one composition would make the portfolio appear too formal and wouldn't represent the warm atmosphere I intend to create. I started with shoots to represent the intimacy and pride aspect of our relationship, this was inspired by the photographer Nastia Cloutier-Ignatiev and her portfolio 'Lovers'. This composition style was close-up photography, presenting my partner and I kissing. I felt this composition style was successful and decided I would not look into it any further after the second shoot because I felt more important compositions should be looked at now; the composition will be in the final portfolio. After this, I focused on portraiture with my partner. I started practising this composition in a studio setting at the college because I had not experimented with the studio much before. The third and fourth shoot was shot in the studio and I found it rather easy to produce a high-quality photo in the studio not long after. I felt I had already perfected this composition by now, after creating a shoot inspired by David Bailey, and considered what else I could do and decided to stick with portraiture, but take it outside of the studio this time; now experimenting with the factor of location in my photos. I felt having locations in the photos in more personal areas such as our homes would add more of the authentic and personal aspect of our relationship, removing the formality from the photo. The fifth and sixth shoot was shot in me and my partner's homes, the shoots were inspired by the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. I felt these two shoots were my weakest out of all the other shoots, the composition overall wasn't as structured compared to other shoots and it lacked creativity. The positive from these shoots was they did represent a marital and commitment symbolism, which I felt was representing my partner and I's projection of aspirations to spend the rest of our lives together.

Overall, I feel I need to improve the composition and structure of portraiture outside of the studio, by further practising and making ideas of compositions I can shoot in various locations important to our relationship, such as our homes, locations we typically spend time together, locations that hold history to us. Moving forward I feel I should now focus on the editing and presentation side of my project. By this I mean I should now look into different edit styles I could create into my photos to create a more impacting and intriguing appearance. In my edit experiments in the previous shoots, I have looked into the incorporation of writing into the photo and feel furthering this would be perfect for presenting the aspects of my relationship I intend to present. So for future shoots, I would like to continue improving my skill in location portraiture, while doing this I will start experimenting with editing styles involving writing. I have also decided that I will present the documentary in a scrapbook presentation because I feel this represents the love and commitment I intend to present; while practising my shoots I will be looking into how I will create this scrapbook presentation. Furthermore, I have considered also creating a video to present even more humanity and love into my final project, alongside with the scrapbook. I will be looking into artists that create film and considering how I will go about creating this video for my final project.