My visual and photographic focus for this photography A2 exam is to use old photographs of me from when I was younger, as well as using my old photographs of when my parents and other family members were younger. I have produced a different blog post where I briefly talk about why I decided to use the photographs that I am thinking of using. However, I decided to use old photographs with the purpose of telling the truth about my childhood and what it was like growing up in a whole different place to what I live in now. I am also using old photographs so I will be able to manipulate what they are representing and their truth, into something that will be able to tell a completely different story to what they originally did, which is something that I find to be very interesting and unique. Because I had an awful huge amount of photographs, there had to be a selection system for me to be able to decide which photographs I was going to be using for this exam.  Therefore, before starting to select my photographs, I had a look back at my four main artists that I was looking at which are Liz Steketee, Chino Otsuka, Joachim Schmid and John Stezaker. I had another look at their photo montages and what they would be doing to their photographs, then had a look back at my own photographs that were similar in visuals, however still making sure that those visually similar photographs were still telling the kind of story that I wanted. Not only was I looking back at this artist’s styles for inspiration but I was also looking and visualizing what I wanted to do with my photographs myself, as I wanted to respond to each of my artists closely but I also wanted to do what I felt like the photograph needed, being able to manipulate them in my own way and style. Above I have included some photographs of the amount of photographs I had to go through to make sure I had a good selection of photographs to use. Because they are all printed out and / or in albums, which used to be the only way to get your photographs twenty years ago, I had then scan each one individually using my printer. By scanning them, I was able to have a digital copy of each one and this therefore allowing me to digitally manipulate them using Photoshop.