I believe my final photobook was extremely successful. However, to improve I believe my experience would’ve been a lot easier with more preparation In prep for my next mock exam and the final exam, I must remember to complete small details which should not be left until the final 3 day exam, as this will waste time and may prevent me from finishing all my tasks. Unfortunately I was not able to print my book to Blurb on the final day of the mock exam, and instead had to order it the day after, this can not happen in my real exam and must be completed within the time limit. However, this mock has taught be to work more efficiently with time and pay attention to the blog posts, planning and prep hat needs to be done in the weeks leading up to the final mock. I believe that however, I worked well under the pressure and solved any issues which resulted. For example, my images were not of a high enough quality to be posted onto my book, this was an issue I had to overcome, and attempt to find images of better quality which would not result in low quality and blurry images in my final book. Another issue I also faced is my final complete blog post with all screenshots and aspects of my mock process was unable to saved and erased from the blog, the outcome of this has been a highly less detailed analysis of my work completed on the mock date, however, with extra work and more explaining I will be able to overcome this by attempting to replace any screenshots that were erased and attempting to find clear pictures that I can use to input into my analysis blog post. I also need to beforehand, work on a practice book on Adobe Lightroom, where I can experiment with photo layouts and what kind of layout will look clean and effective to help my images be presented in the best way possible. An aspect of my work I am glad I included was a small paragraph demonstrating my intention for each magazine at the beginning of the book, this sort of contents page has helped to escalate the quality of my book and helped the reader to understand my intention of female gender stereotypes over time. I have focused mostly on the contextual and conceptual side of my work and focused more on a storyline of work and demonstrating a feminist viewpoint and both critiquing and praising the works of photographers through time. I also referenced both of my inspiration photographers Cindy Sherman and Helmut Newton in my book through my essay. I incorporated their work into a paragraph of analysis on their work and their intention. I then focused a paragraph on image analysis of their work and how I can relate it to my own, I then also compared a theorists with their work and highlighted the differences and similarities of their work, alongside the positives and negative of their viewpoints. I also incorporated my two inspiration photographers by including a photoshoot each in my book of images inspired by their work, this has helped my work be more relatable to the analysis I have completed on their work, and how modern day photography can relate to their work, without provocative and negative stereotypes of women.

PHOTOBOOK: Mon-Wed + MOCK EXAM
Follow these steps:

You want to aim for a draft layout before the Mock Exam begins, then use the two days allocated to fine tune final layout and design.

Draft Layout of Photobook.

1. Write a book specification and describe in detail what your book will be about in terms of narrative, concept and design with reference to the same elements of bookmaking as above.

Narrative-

Narrative: – Describe in:

• 3 words – Female Gender Stereotypes

• A sentence– The importance of stereotypes forced upon women in the past and present day and how it affects society and young adolescent girls.

• A paragraph– The topic I would like to explore is girlhood and femininity. I will be focusing particularly on older teenagers at the age of 17-19 and the struggles of moving from adolescence to adulthood and the hardships young women face. I like this topic as it is a current topic which is faced globally, and I feel it is a topic which I will enjoy expressing my opinion on and it is an important topic which needs embracing by young people especially. I would like to initially explore how the media portrays women in positive and negative ways and how it creates derogatory and unrealistic stereotypes of women. Gender Identity and roles is a topic I wanted incorporate and the stereotypical themes and personality traits a woman is expected to have. I find this topic interesting as expectations and views on women are changing but not particularly quickly. By focusing on multiple branches of femininity and youth such as empowerment, stereotypes, different eras, I would like to cover different aspects of women, femininity gender stereotypes, identity and rights. The idealised view of women is the key part to my chosen topic, and I feel I can expand on this by including both positive and negative viewpoints. 

• How you want your book to look and feel– I would like my book to be a hard cover rectangular/ squared book with a clean sleek feel to it. I would like it to be relatively large (around A4) this is to create a book which is not too difficult to read and so that my images are not too small to see the details and understand the message behind them.

• Paper and ink

I am using a magazine layout style book which will have thinner paper for my book to have a more magazine feel to it rather than a book feel. This will be thinner paper inside which magazines and newspapers typically have.

• Binding and cover

This front cover will be a soft/paper back front cover due to it being a magazine and not a book.

• Title – My title will be something to do with the male gaze. I would like the title to just plainly be ‘The Male Gaze’ but I feel this title may be slightly too basic and not capture an audiences attention as quickly. However I also like the idea of ‘Through his Eyes: Exploring Femininity and Stereotypes, I really like this title as it is including the male gaze in a way of not directly saying Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze but instead saying it in a less direct way. The next part of ‘Exploring Femininity and Stereotypes’ also is a short way or explaining the project I am exploring. However this second section may make my title slightly too long, however I really like this title but could also shorten it to ‘Through his Eyes’ as a large title and then accompanied and anchored with the subheading of ‘Exploring Femininity and Stereotypes’. Here are some other ideas for title names:
• – The Male Gaze
• – The Gaze
• – Gazing
• – Through their eyes
• – Through His Eyes: Exploring Femininity and Stereotypes

• Design and layout

I am going to have a book with a main front cover, a first front cover with a magazine interpretation of a 1960s/70s magazine., using Cindy Sherman inspired images. I am then going to have a magazine cover of a modern day girls magazine with promotional images of products inside, I will then have a final magazine cover from a modern day women’s empowerment magazine with Helmut Newton inspired images inside.

• Editing and sequencing

I am going to create this book on Adobe Lightroom and It will include images that are edited by using black and white filters and also editing resources provided by Lightroom to make my images bolder and higher quality. I will also be editing a section of images on Adobe Photoshop, which make the images look like promotional images with brands such as Gucci, Charlotte Tilbury promoted inside the book, I have also edited the magazine covers on Canva in order to create realistic magazine covers from software specialising in covers, this has helped to increase the value and complexity of my work to make it more realistic and believeable.

• Images and text-I would like my images to take up the whole page so that they are large enough to see, however this may be a struggle as many of my images are portrait and many of them landscape. This may means that my e.g. portrait images would not be able to fit the page completely. However, any portrait images could have a small white border around them, but still take up the majority of a page, or vice versa. I do not think that I want more than 1 image on a page, however when it comes to my second section and I am focusing on the fashion and beauty industry pushing beauty products onto young girls in order to make them want to be beautiful and purchase their their products.

2. Produce a mood-board 

Here is a mood board of the Blurb Inspired photobook I have seen. I would like my images to be presented in a clean, sleek way which makes the book easy to read and enjoyable. I like his layout of clean white lines to separate images as I think it makes the page look less busy and does not clash with other images which decreases the quality of the book.

9. EVALUATION: Upon completion of photobook/ film and presentation of prints make sure you evaluate and reflect on your learning and final outcomes. Comment on the following:

I believe my final photobook was extremely successful. However, to improve I believe my experience would’ve been a lot easier with more preparation In prep for my next mock exam and the final exam, I must remember to complete small details which should not be left until the final 3 day exam, as this will waste time and may prevent ,e from finishing all my tasks. Unfortunately I was not able to print my book to Blurb on the final day of the mock exam, and instead had to order it the day after, this can not happen in my real exam and must be completed within the time limit. However, this mock has taught be to work more efficiently with time and pay attention to the blog posts, planning and prep hat needs to be done in the weeks leading up to the final mock. I believe that however, I worked well under the pressure and solved any issues which resulted. For example, my images were not of a high enough quality to be posted onto my book, this was an issue I had to overcome, and attempt to find images of better quality which would not result in low quality and blurry images in my final book. Another issue I also faced is my final complete blog post with all screenshots and aspects of my mock process was unable to saved and erased from the blog, the outcome of this has been a highly less detailed analysis of my work completed on the mock date, however, with extra work and more explaining I will be able to overcome this by attempting to replace any screenshots that were erased and attempting to find clear pictures that I can use to input into my analysis blog post. I also need to beforehand, work on a practice book on Adobe Lightroom, where I can experiment with photo layouts and what kind of layout will look clean and effective to help my images be presented in the best way possible.

5. Print a set of small work prints (4 to one A4 page) on the Laserjet, cut them up in guillotine and lay them out on the big white table for editing.

6. Decide on format (landscape, portrait) size and style of your photo-book. Begin to design your photo book, considering carefully, narrative, editing, sequencing, page spreads, juxtaposition, image size, text pages, empty pages, use of archival material etc.

I would like for my book to be around 30-40 pages long, like a usual conventional magazine and I would like for there to be sections dividing up my photoshoots, I will be adding my essay to the back of the book and I will be including a contents page to the beginning of my book.

7. Add your illustrated essay at the end of your photo book, including title, any captions (if needed), bibliography, illustrations of artists work (incl data) and images of your own responses. Think carefully about font type, size and weighting.

1:

2:

Evaluation:

Overall, I am very happy with these final photos. I feel that I linked them all to one main theme, yet they tell different stories individually. I edited them all to be unique and different through tones and shadows. Therefore, these images stand out between each other and makes viewers question the narrative behind the photos.

Here are the images I will be using for my photobook. I chose my best images as well as images that included the main subject, tony. I colour coded them to help me organise the layout in the photobook. Purple means its documentary photos of a basketball game. blue are photos of tony in his room. Green are photos of the team mates. yellow are only portrait photos of the team mates faces. and red are photos that don’t fit the rest of the images. The star rating is not important here.

Below is my first try at laying out these images:

Here I have another montage right after the page with Tony in it. This increases the isolation that tony has as pages before and after it are full of people. I also added Tommy on the right and I think It complements the headshots on the left quite well, almost like a ‘zoom in’ into Tommy’s headshot.

I think these two images contrast each other nicely, one is almost sad with the subjects face looking down, likely tired. The other image seems exciting with its vibrant colours, as well as a nice slam dunk in the background.

Here I added to Images that contrast each other again, to add more to this book, making it more interesting. From this part of the book you stop seeing tony, showing that his obsession to be the best has stopped him completely from having fun playing the sport that he loves.

These two images are nicely contrast, with the left image replicating the famous photo of the largest and shortest players, Gheorghe Muresan and Muggsy Bogues:

Here I added more documentary photos of the basketball game, once again not including tony to show his participation in the team is dwindling.

For the final image I decided to use this image of Jesper looking very excited to be there, showing a lot of positive emotion. I think this image finishes of this book quite nicely since it shows that sport is meant to be played for fun, and trying to hard where you stop finding the sport fun is not worth it. I also used this image of Jesper specifically since he is shown a lot more towards the end of the book, making him the centre of attention. The book is divided into 2 parts I think, Tommy’s section at the start and Jespers section at the end, as well as having Tony presented thought the book. This allows me to show 3 different story’s at once, with each subject showing how different there personality is.

I decided to change the front cover to:

This is because I took my documentary photos using a very compressed format so when I scale up my images they become very blurry, so I changed it to a basketball hoop photo too keep with the theme and stop pixilated images from being an issue.

I then added the essay about tableaux vs documentary to the photo book:

As you can see I added the title to its own page spread to lead the reader into the essay.

Evaluation

I think I did a good job at creating a story of a player using photos from 3 different photoshoots. The things I did well in was having a variety of different types of images (including documentary and tableaux, portrait and landscape). I also made use of Juxtaposition with the images, paring coloured and B&W images in an aesthetic way. I used Adobe Garamond Pro for the font, keeping it consistent throughout the book. I also like the minimalist text I added below some of the images to give context to the viewer.

However, I think I didn’t add enough text to the photobook overall, making it less exciting to read. I also think I lacked in the amount of photos I took, especially with the main figure in this book, tony. The image quality was also a problem meaning I cant scale up a lot of my images, making it difficult to lay out the photos in the way I want. I also think the editing is too inconsistent, with some images being slightly darker, some being too colourful, ext.

Identifying colours within each photoshoot – In my photobook I would like a distinct colour scheme either at different parts or a combination of recurring colour schemes to juxtapose and define one photograph from another. The majority of my photos have a warm/neutral tone to them, with the exception of a few cooler tones. At the beginning of my photobook there are a majority of black and white photos, and then the rest of the photos are in colour.

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Photobook Layout – Drafts

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Photobook Layout – Final

With the layout of my photos in this photobook, I wished to shift from solely monochrome photos into colour photos, to juxtapose two different parts of the photobook.

This will be the first page of my photobook, its a sentence stating that its hard to see whats right in front of you, its a symbolic sentence to some up my whole photobook that a lot goes on in a teenagers life, in their head, the reality, compared to what people actually see. As i find it very important to focus on these factors as a teenaer who’s not always loving the school life and stress.

these pages are to show stress and school and how school affect things that are meant to be so important, like sleep, all teenagers are told to get 8-10 hours of sleep as it keeps you wellrested and ready for the day but from the pile up of work and stress sometimes we aren’t getting to sleep until late in the morning, it also demonstartes anxiety and being overwhelmed by looking at the mess on the desk of papers and tests and homework and so on, and its also a mess that a teenager might get told off for.

This page continues on from the school pages as it shows what sometimes teenagers would rather be doing and use as a distraction.

This is how I was going to first present this page, when I looked at some Jim goldberg pages and realise this just didnt give the right affect it needed something more.

I then moved on to this page of adding the rain next to the image to make it seem like when you look out the window like archiewas this is what you can see, as rain gives a sad affect and also its a blurred skewed image of what might also be in the head.

this image actually didn’t end up staying in my final piece because it was more of a practise of writing on the image and didn’t look as good or professional as I wanted it also didn’t go with my other images.

this was my practice last page but I wasn’t feeling it as the images didn’t go how I wanted and it was too much going on.

I tried to give a continous balck background to all my images to add to the effect nd make the images stand out, I thought it wet well as it was dark and gloomier, and corresponded well with the majority black and white images, I also kept my writing on the images or next to them to keep the story because yes a photo tells 1000 stories but it was important that the teenagers stories actually ame out and was presented, it ry to keep a sequence of how I present my images ina decently together story.

These are all the photographs I picked to use for my photobook, but I only used the high quality images.

At first it was a struggle to find a title but I used the title “Paraíso” which means paradise in Portuguese. I decided to use the word paradise because being with friends and family and especially being in your native island feels like paradise, and feels like everything is just amazing. I then decided to translate it since my first language is Portuguese and most of the photoshoots in my book is from madeira.

This is my final print layout.

For my third photoshoot I took a photoshoot of different places in madeira and photos of my family there too. I decided to do this because it will show a bit of my family background and what culture I come from.

Below are some of the edited images I am going to use in my photobook. This photoshoot was very fun to do because it made me close to my family since we spent a lot of time together and we explored different parts of the island we have never been with amazing views.