Assignment 5

These are the photographs and narrative that I have submitted for Assignment 5:

Assignment five.   Personal Project

Due to demanding work commitments it has taken me considerably longer than anticipated to get to this stage of the DPP course.  I have had to complete assignments four and five in short order so as to make the two year cut off period.  I had anticipated that I would have to complete the final two assignments during June and July so I had read and forward and pre-planned most of the work I would need to conduct.  To that end I had a good idea as to the topic that I would undertake sometime before commencing the assignment.

I had considered several topics for the assignment; one was landscapes in general, as I had a few opportunities to take a variety of interesting landscapes with a trips to Scotland and the Peak district.  The second option that I considered was a human interest story based on my father’s 70^th birthday celebrations.  The third idea was to use the city of Lincoln (where I live) as the theme.

After some deliberations and attempts at all three themes I decided to go with ‘the city of Lincoln’.  There were several reasons for my choice; firstly I considered that there was quite a lot of interesting subject matter to be utilised in a theme of Lincoln with plenty of different aspects of the town that could be used to demonstrate the various techniques that I have learnt about on the course.  Secondly using Lincoln meant that I was easily able to reshoot scenes that had not come out as well as I had wanted first time, I was also well aware of where to go to get the best shots.  With Lincoln being on my door step I was also able to take scenes in different light and weather conditions.

The best part about using Lincoln was the fact that being a local I could already picture in my head many of the shots that I wanted to take.  I was pretty much able to stick to my brief throughout the shoot.  I wanted to capture the iconic aspects of Lincoln, in particular the Cathedral, Steep Street and the quayside.  Although I tried I was unable to get the shots of the town centre that I had envisaged, this was due to a variety of reasons but ultimately I found that the shots that I had taken were not particularly interesting or out of focus.  There were also a few opportunities that I had not pre-planned that presented themselves whilst I was out on the various shoots; in particular the flower shots were not pre-planned.

I am reasonably pleased with my final collection of pictures; I did conduct some minor post processing, mostly cropping images for a more pleasing composition and some alterations of the exposure with the curves tool.  I had tried not to make too many other alterations.  I would have liked to make some of the shots a little more interesting but I am not sure as how I could have best done that.  My main goal was to sell Lincoln in the best possible I light and I am fairly content that I have managed to do that.