Evaluation

Evaluation of Education Assignment

The first part of the assignment process which I am going to evaluate is the blog. This blog was quite successful, being that I remembered to put my research and the whole process of the assignment on my blog this time, improving on last time where I kept forgetting to do so. With this blog, I ended up putting most of the things on my blog right at the end because I was so focused on actually getting the work done, but at least this time I actually remembered to put it on there at all.

The second part of the assignment process which I am going to evaluate is working as part of a group. In my group there were four photographers and no stylists, so it was more difficult for us to decide on clothing. However, I think we all worked together very well. We each were in charge of an outfit to style and a stereotype to shoot and edit, and we all got a say in everything, so we all got on with the work very well. Overall, we all had equal roles as photographers and stylists in this assignment.

I am now going to evaluate the photoshoots. The test shoot that we did could probably have gone a bit better, as we could not get the model in for that day, and so I had to model instead for that one shoot. However it gave us the chance to make sure that everything went smoothly on the actual shoot, which it actually did. The model was good with contributing to pose, wardrobe and hair ideas, and nothing went drastically wrong, other than during the Twitter photoshoot, we forgot to change the background colour from red to blue, but we worked it out in the end and got some good final shots from it. We each shot our own stereotype, and then there was one left once we’d finished and so we each shot some photographs for that one.

The next part of the assignment which I am going to evaluate is the editing process. Each member of our group got to decide which photographs got to go into the final editorials. We made minimal changes to the actual photographs, because we got the lighting and model looking good enough so we did not have to change too much.

Finally, I am going to evaluate the final images and the layout. The layout features notebook-style lines, to make it seem like a school notebook that someone has doodled in. This works well as it fits with the education theme. We also put doodles around the edges of the images and chose borders for the images which we felt fit in with whatever particular stereotype we were showing. Overall, I think the images are very successful as single images and as part of an editorial. I like how all the photographs are against a coloured background so they seem like the typical school photographs. We put quotes on the final layouts as well, just to reinforce the theme of education. 

Final Images!

These are the final photographs and layouts for our education fashion assignment. We decided on making the layout look like a school notebook type thing with lined paper, doodles on each page which relate to each stereotype and images which can be related to the stereotypes in question. 

I think this worked very well for the theme of people getting their education through Social Networking websites more than schooling. The quotes and the layouts and doodles reinforce the theme of education which we tried to achieve in each one. 

I actually think that the original idea for this project is quite clichéd and has been done before quite a few times, but the way in which we have presented our final images turned a clichéd idea into a very original one, as I think we related more to the stereotypes which we were photographing than some other photographers may have done. 

Quotes on Education

“Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.” - Ernest Dimnet

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” - Albert Einstein

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

“Your schooling may be over, but remember that your education still continues. - Author unknown

“Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and doing something remarkable.” - Wendy Wasserstein

“Look beyond the paint. Let us try to open our mind to a new idea”. - Katherine Watson, Mona Lisa Smile.

“Education should be gentle and stern, not cold and lax.” - Joseph Joubert

“The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded.” - Paul Saffo

“Brian Johnson:Dear Mr. Vernon: We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But, we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But, what we found out is that each one of us is: a brain …Andrew Clark:And an athlete …Allison Reynolds:And a basket case …Claire Standish:A princess …John Bender:And a criminal.Brian Johnson:Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club.” 

Layout

For our layout, we decided to have a double page introduction with photographs and quotes (which can be seen above), and then we will give each photograph one page to have photographs and doodles. We are planning on making the pages look like a school notebook / yearbook type thing, which is why we did the photographs on coloured backgrounds, to get that "school photograph" look to the photographs. Then on the final page, we are going to put the quote from The Breakfast Club, along with one photograph from each stereotype. 

Contact Sheets!

Facebook contact sheet

Myspace contact sheet

Tumblr contact sheets

Twitter contact sheets

Youtube contact sheets

These are the contact sheets from our final photo shoots. There were one or two complications with lighting leaving a massive black shadow over the whole background, and on one of the shoots we did half of the shots on a red background when it was supposed to be blue, but other than that, everything got sorted out fine and ended up really good.

Test shoot!!

These are some photographs from the test shoots that we did. They aren't brilliant because we couldnt get the model in for the day of the test shoots, so I had to do it instead. But this shows the type of things we were planning on getting during the final shoot with the real model. For the lighting, we just had one beauty dish, pointing down slightly at the model, because this seemed to get the best colour out of the background, whilst lighting the model as well. 

From looking at the test shoots, I could tell that the outfits were going to work really well during the actual shoot as well as during the test, so we did quite a good job at styling, considering we were four photography students with no past experience of styling in the past. The one which didnt work was the "Youtube", nerdy outfit, which originally consisted of a white shirt, black skirt and red cardigan. I'm glad we changed the idea for that outfit, as it just looks a bit strange and uncomfortable in the test shot. 

This test shoot helped us to see things which needed to be changed, such as the Youtube outfit, and developing and researching different poses to use in the final shoot.

POSE RESEARCH!!!

So I didnt need much research into clothing or anything, as I kind of knew how Rocker type people dress from years of wearing the look myself. I also didnt really need to do much research in the way of shooting techniques, because we all decided that we were going to use the same lighting set-ups to make the editorial look kind of like a "high school year book" kind of thing, just using different coloured backgrounds for a few of the outfits just to give a bit of change to the look of the photographs so that they didnt all look the same.

What I really felt like I needed to research though was the kind of poses that I could try and get the model to do, so that's what I'm going to put on here before I put up the photos from the test shoot and final photographs.

We decided that we would each style and photograph the same stereotype, so I shot and styled the "Myspace" theme. This meant that when looking for inspirations for poses, I looked mainly for rockstar poses, live band photographs, and stuff like that. Here are the images that I found.

I think this pose is really interesting because of the props. I tried a couple of shots using this kind of pose when we did the actual shoot, as it gets across the attitude of a rock star, whilst also making sure you can see all the clothes and styling, and so helping in the fashion element as well.

I think this pose is only really interesting because of the person who is being photographed, rather than the pose itself. The tattoos, hair and clothing are what make this photograph stand out, and the pose itself is quite plain. Which in a way is quite good.

 I didnt do any shots like this because I obviously wasn't shooting a live band, and so it would have been difficult to get the energy right, and not make it look too posed. I decided to put this in here anyway, as I think it is a really interesting pose and it would have been great if I could have gotten the energy in the photograph to create such an unposed and interesting look.

 This pose was fairly obvious when thinking about Myspace and Rock stars. This hand gesture is used a lot in the Rocker world, and in my photographs that I took, because I think it is something which people would relate to the stereotype of "Rocker" and "Myspace".

I put this in because I wanted to get a photo kind of like this with the model playing an instrument. Unfortunately the model we got didnt know how to play so it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to.

Oh God

The last few weeks have been kind of hectic. We've actually done the whole project now, and I realised today that yet again I have been neglecting my blog! So that's not good. I'll be posting a lot this next week then, because I've got some research that I've done that I want to put up before I put up the test shoots and actual photos.
BUT in this blog, I just want to go through the outfits that we chose, as we're a group of four photographers, so we each had to do a bit of styling as well as photographing.
We each were in charge of styling one of the five stereotypes we have shown, and I was in charge of the "Myspace" rocker outfit. For this I chose an oversized tee shirt with skeletons on it, ripped shorts, leather jacket, patterned leggings and studded black high heels. I also chose rocker-ish jewellery and accessories to go with the theme, such as a black studded belt, sunglasses, and silver / black bangles and necklaces. We also decided that we might use props in our photographs, so I took some photographs of the model playing an electric guitar, as this goes with the "Myspace" theme, as Myspace has become more about the music scene over the past few years.

Other outfits include :
Twitter - Gossip - White dress, blue blazer and pumps. Accessories - Satchel style bag, pearl-like / gold jewellery. Props - mobile phone.
Tumblr - Arty - Assortment of colourful tee shirts, mainly red, black waistcoat, black shorts, patterned tights, black ballet-pumps. Accessories - Lots of colourful bangles and necklaces. Props - Picture frame.
Facebook - Prom Queen / Popular - Red prom style dress, stilletto heels. Accessories - Silver tiara.
Youtube - Geeky - Checked shirt, black skirt. Accessories - Fluffy hair ties, suspenders, geek glasses.

I think we managed to get the outfits quite accurate to the stereotypes we were trying to show.

More Social Networking Stereotypes

I found this on Heather's blog, and I thought I'd put it on mine as well because it is an interesting way of showing social networking, in an American Yearbook style, as this helps to get across all the different stereotypes. Also, it might give some ideas as to how we might do the layout for our editorial.

I think that is one of the next things we will have to discuss as a group, because we only have 5 stereotypes and we somehow have to fill 8 pages with images of those stereotypes. We may have to do some as a double page spread and some as a single page, or even come up with a few more stereotypes to convey. 

Ideas

My group has come up with a few ideas for how to photograph this idea of Education, and come up with a few good ideas styling-wise.

We have decided that we are going to have models showing the social networking site's particular stereotypes, which are :

Facebook - popular, slutty? - Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites. Everyone seems to have one, and in profile photographs and such, people always seem to dress quite provocatively. Also, people tend to care a lot about what they look like in photographs which are put on Facebook, as no one wants to look bad in any photos.

Myspace - Emo, rocker, musician?, individual? - Myspace was always used by the more "emo" stereotype of people when it was really popular a few years ago. People tended to have their own style. Now, Myspace seems to have become more about the musical side of things, having it's own record label and stuff, which would also fit into that category of emo / rocker style.

YouTube - Nerdy - I think we decided that YouTube was more of a nerdy website stereotype, based on the fact that it tends to be a lot more technical. People need to know how to work a video camera and usually edit their movies before they put them on YouTube, which makes it seem more nerdy than the other sites.

Twitter - Gossip, Celebrity - Twitter provides a lot of gossip about celebrities as a lot of celebrities have a twitter account and have "tweeted" outrageous things about people which other people would be interested in hearing. It educates people into the lives of celebrities.

Tumblr - Arty - Tumblr is somewhere where a lot of people share their art / photography / photoshopped images etc.

We're thinking of finding clothes to fit these stereotypes together. Each person in the group will have one area to look at finding an outfit for, but we will all give our own input on each of the outfits.

EDUCATION

So the new brief was given out a few weeks ago, and my computer has only just decided that it's going to let me access my blog! So now is as good a time as any to get started on researching

I have a group for this assignment, made up of four photographers - Me, Heather Whitfield, Sophie Morris and Alison O'keeffe. Obviously it is not ideal that we have 4 photographers instead of having some stylists to help with the styling side of the brief, but we seem to be getting on with that side of things okay.

We have decided to do our assignment based around stereotypes and social networking, which I think is an interesting way of interpreting Education. Young people seem to get most of their education from the internet these days, and the idea of looking good in a profile picture makes people want to educate themselves into making themself look better for that purpose and learn how to make themself into the stereotypical view of how a user of a particular networking site "should" look.
Also, people can find out a lot of gossip from Social Networking sites. This leads to social education as it is making people more in the know as to what is going on in the world of celebrity, or what is going on in their own lives.

The interpretations behind showing Education through Social Networking sites are endless!