Evaluation

Evaluation: The Manufactured Image

To start with, my project was based around office workers, and commuters who all appear to do the same thing day in day out, and how they lose their identity They almost appear to be like robots or cattle to the stress of everyday life commuting in the city of London. I wanted to create an image which on first gaze appeared normal, but you had to look closer to see what was actually wrong.

However, after a bit more thought and research, I realised that this idea had been done quite a lot, and wasn’t as unique as I would have liked it to have been. Instead, I chose change my project to something a bit different to my original idea. I chose to base it around tourism, and sight seeing, but not in the conventional way. My point was to remove the sense of sight from tourists who appear not to be interested in the scenery around them. This draws on the idea of something having an aura, and how in modern age the aura has diminished due to the invention of photography.

Many tourists and people visiting sight seeing destinations are often told where to go and what to do. They take their camera, their camera phone, iPad, anything that can take an image, take a snap of the thing that they are visiting (for example the London Eye) and then move along. They are more concerned with getting an image for their holiday than they are about taking in the beauty of these amazing sights.

When looking at the image for the first time, you might not first notice what is wrong with the image, but something doesn’t feel quite right. This is the effect I tried to create. I tried not to make it look as though the people were zombies, as that wasn’t the type of atmosphere I wanted to create.

I based a lot of my ideas for the images on Aziz and Cucher’s images on Dystopia, however the underlying meaning of their work differs very slightly from mine. Theirs is more about loss of identity, mine is more about the loss of aura and excitement of landmarks.

I had a few problems with this project which I think effected the overall outcome. Firstly, I was working with a 50mm 1.8 lens on a Canon 5D mark 2. This probably wasn’t the right type of lens to use for this project. I found it quite hard to get a clear shot of someone’s face with the landmarks in the background. If I had taken this into consideration more beforehand, I probably could have worked with a combination of zoom lenses and wide angle to accommodate both aspects.

I was working in quite grey, gloomy conditions, which is quite common for the time of year I was shooting in London. Consequently I had to increase the ISO when shooting, which in turn left me with some quite grainy shots. In order to avoid this I could have gone on a different day, or worked in film. Unfortunately time was against me, not making this possible.

Overall I am quite happy with my shots. I have chosen to do one A2 print and two A3 prints. I chose my favourite shot to have larger as I believe it is the one that is the most convincing. I think that had I had more time and better weather conditions with this project, I could have created more edits and would possibly see how well my Photoshop skills improve.