TPI - Assignment 7

This was by far the best assignment of the course so far.  What appeared to be a simple task when I first read it turned into an unexpected journey.  Although I'm interested in photography I had never really studied the work of great photographers.  Sure, I was familiar with some and during this assignment I began to realise how much of their work is out there for all to see. 

I also had a long hard think about the type of photography that I really enjoy and want to pursue. This involved trawling through countless images on-line and in books and magazines (something which I do anyway).  After a while I could see that there were certain images I was drawn to.  I used a useful feature on flickr to collect images that I liked.  The "gallery" option lets you create galleries made of images from other flickr users.  I built up a collection of images over a period of time and after a while I could see a type, style, genre that I was drawn to more that others.  If I'm honest I like taking all types of pictures so it was difficult to select one area to focus on, however, if I had the choice to be great at one area of photography it would be portraits.....and in particular, Black and white portraits.

The image I selected for Part A was one that I had seen before but never new much about it.  Whenever I did a search for Black and White portraits it would always appear and would stand out more than any others on the screen.  It was THE picture I had to copy.  By coincidence I had borrowed a book from a friend at work and the photographer who's work I was going to copy was in there.  What suprised me was that it was a photography I knew about.  As an avid U2 fan since their early days I knew that they were almost always photographed by Anton Corbijn.  It was only then that I found out that he made the image I was going to copy....small world.    Like I said earlier, their work is everywhere and these days I find myself looking at images and trying to work out who's work it is.  Over time I'm sure I'll get better at it.

Taking the image was an great experience too.  At first I was trying to take the shot on my own but this was proving difficult.  In the end I had to get help from my wife, so technically I didn't actually take the picture.

For the second part of the assignment I also focused on portraits and spent even more time searching through images in order to find a bunch of them that I was happy with.

Again, I was very pleased with my score but as always the comments from my tutor where much more important.