MED4112 - Media Photography Skills

For this assessment, we were required to create a photo essay that contained 12 images, the subject was our choice. The choice I made was London delivery drivers, based in West Hampstead. I made this choice as it was a job of mine when I lived in London, it was something that I enjoyed and something I was interested in. I chose a group of six individuals who worked for a range of different delivery companies. I approached them one by one explaining my project to them and they were more than happy to help, this allowed the photography to be confrontational and obtrusive. I decided to capture shots of them doing their day-to-day job of collecting food from restaurants and driving up and down the roads. I ensured that I captured significant moments as well, for example some shots are of the delivery driver placing the food in their box, which is also a hint into what the photo essay is about. For this project, I used a Canon EOS 700D with a standard 18-55mm lens, when capturing the shots, I used three different modes these were; Manual, Shutter Priority, and Aperture Priority. I mainly used Manual as the weather kept on changing and I did need to adjust the ISO.

This project took me one day of shooting to complete in a rough three-hour slot and I captured just over 150 photographs. This was helpful as I had a large variety to choose from but the decision process was tough as some had to be removed. I focussed on capturing four different types of shots, these are; Establishing Shots, Detailed Shots, Action Shots, and Portrait Shots. I based my project on these sub-headings and knew I had to capture photographs that fit into these criteria. Comparing this photography experience to others in the past I would say it was most enjoyable as the confrontation was not difficult. One thing that I believe I could have improved was getting closer when taking these confrontational photographs.

Once I had captured all my photographs I then brought them back to Birmingham where I could later edit them using Adobe Photoshop and then further more go on to choosing the final 12. When I first put my images onto my computer I created several folders with the sub-headings as the names so I could see how many shots of each I got. This also allowed me to get a better understanding of what images can be used for the final 12. One thing that I did realise when looking through the images is that not all of them came out how I thought they did, which made me realise that the LED screen on the camera may make it seem good even though when on a larger scale it looks bad. This taught me to always take a substantial number of pictures of the one subject so you can choose the best one. I had a portrait shot of Muhammed but I only took two and neither of them came out to a high enough standard even though the composition was good. This will be taken into a count on future occasions.

The first set of images I began to edit were the establishing ones, I believed that these images are the first of the 12 so editing them first will allow me to get an understanding of the type of editing I will be using, it also allowed me to keep a similar brightness running throughout. I narrowed the establishing images down to 8 before editing and then began editing. The first step I did for all my editing was cropping the images all to roughly the same size as I am aware that consistency will benefit the photographs. I then began adjusting the levels on my establishing images, this was to bring the darker tones out more, having the tonal range pan from around 18 – 255, this generated some darkness in the image which I believed looked better. I then used the brightness/contrast tool, increasing the contrast to give the objects in the image a stronger shape. I also raised the saturation on the images to make up for loss of colour through prior editing stages.

Once I finished editing my potential establishing images, I then moved on to editing the action images, which are some of my favourite images of the day. I edited these images in two parts as one consisted of photographs with not much colour and the other with a lot of colour, for the ones without colour I adjusted the brightness/contrast and increased the saturation to bring out the colours. The images that had a lot of colour were darkened a little bit to keep the repetition flowing through my photographs.

When looking through my selection of detailed shots I was half happy and half disappointed as I feel as though I could have captured some better shots then what I had. I understood that if I had taken a wider variety of detailed shots I would not be reflecting on it now, but this was noted and will be used productively on future dates. I came to a selection of around 5 detailed images which I then took into Adobe Photoshop, the main editing technique I used on these images was brightness/contrast, I used this as some of the images were too bright and the contrast tool brought out the detail in the image. The specific image which I like a lot is image 8 as you can see almost every detail of the shot, including his delivery app that even says how much he made on his last delivery.

The final images that I had to edit were the portrait images, I had taken several but could only use 3-4 which was quite disappointing, but I did come to an understanding as to why this happened, and this is because I did not take enough shots. Some images were less focussed then I originally thought as well which means I have to take more care when focussing my future photographs. I believe that these images were the hardest ones to edit because of the colours and lightness as well as one of my subjects had a face mask on so it was hard to find the right editing technique. The main adjustments I made were to saturation, brightness and contrast. Saturation helped me bring out the colour in the jacket of one of my subjects which turned out to be a good photograph.

Once I had completed editing all the images I was still left with around 16 photographs which meant I had to get rid of some to ensure there was only 12. This stage was time-consuming as I had to keep looking at them and clicking through them in a sequence but once I made the choice I was happy with it. I believe that in conclusion I have had several advantages and several disadvantages throughout this project. Some advantages being the composition of some of the shots and even capturing some of the action shots specifically image 11. Some disadvantages throughout have been small but often end in me needing to take more time when photographing the subject and a wider variety to ensure I have a choice of images to use.