Plan

Below is my plan for my first photoshoot – I may end up splitting this photoshoot into two, due to ease of access and different weather etc – my desired locations for this shoot are listed below, both important locations to me and my childhood, having grown up there. I plan to capture abstract type and traditional landscape images.

Genre	Idea	Location	Props	Settings
Landscape, abstract	memory and nature, sense of place	St Ouens bay and St Brelade’s	Camera, Tripod.	Landscape, Creative Auto, Manual.

Contact Sheets

After importing my images from this photoshoot into a folder in Lightroom titled ‘shoot1’ inside my “Simple and Complex” collection set, I began to filter and select my images. I used P and X to filter my images, and highlighted specific types of images in different colours: for example, as seen below, abstract type images in red.

I started this shoot at the top of Mont Matthieu, in St Ouens. This is the hill that I lived at the top of for the first few years of my life. In this part of the shoot, I wanted to capture the lines of the roads, the horizon and the textures in the surrounding landscapes: the fields, roads and sky.

As the shoot continued, I moved down the hill of Mont Matthieu and into St Ouen’s Bay, starting first at the fields at the bottom of the hill and then to a section of the beach that is really important to me – in this section of my shoot, also pictured below, I was focusing on line and shape. I shot in the golden hour on this day, which meant I captured some really lovely shadows and warm tones in my images. After creating some abstract images that I really liked in the first part of my shoot on the hill, I reviewed them and continued to produce similar images on the beach.

I normally struggle with over/underexposure in my shoots at some point, but in this shoot, I didn’t find this to be a massive problem. I tried to think about where the sun was in every shot and location, which avoided unwanted glare in my photographs. Furthermore, I planned this shoot for golden hour, which was about 3/4 pm at this time. This meant the sun was at the perfect level to provide the highest quality light, eliminating overexposure and creating rich warm tones in my images.

Selections

Below are my best images, unedited. In my editing process for this photo shoot, I used a lot of cropping to create more interesting compositions, so the final images look quite different in comparison to their originals.

Editing

In my editing for this shoot, I focused on cropping to create more interesting compositions. Due to the strong leading lines and different shapes in a lot of my images, I used cropping to highlight these more and create more balanced photographs.

In a few of my edits for this photoshoot, I experimented with colour edits after editing in B and W, mainly experimenting with tint and different filters. specifically, I focused on increased/decreased contrast, because I wanted to try different presentations of strong lines and shapes in these images. For example, in the first image I edited, I increased the contrast a lot in order to accentuate the strong lines and differences in black and white tones in either side of the image.

Final Images

These are my best images for this shoot.

Evaluation

I think this shoot was probably my most successful out of my whole project. This is unusual for me, as I normally find my shoots get better as my project progresses, as my ideas become more clear and I get into a better flow of making images. However, I had quite clear ideas of what I wanted to capture before I went out on this shoot and I picked a good time to shoot. I shot in golden hour, with dry conditions on a sunny day, without wind to minimise camera shake. I shot in a familiar location too, which meant I could visualise before I took my images what I wanted them to look like and where specifically I would be shooting. I also think I used slightly different types of editing to my usual style. I don’t normally use a lot of cropping, and often seem to neglect it in my previous projects. However, in this project this has become one of, if not the most important part of my editing, as I have created much more abstract images to my usual style. Cropping has become much more important in these images to create better compositions, and also because different cropping can change the perspective of lines and shapes in an image completely.