Initial Ideas...

When thinking about costs of living, I feel that emotions play a big part of this, and thought that I could have a series of portraits of people showing different emotions. While you could expect that they would all be negative, I think that having positive images would still fit the theme. For example, someone laughing would be a positive image, but would show laughter lines, which show the cost of living. However, I could go the opposite way, and show the positivity of life.
This image by Garry Winogrand 'Woman with Ice-Cream Cone' (1968), is the sort of shot I would like to take.

 

I like the idea of doing the project based around people being lost, or alone. For example, I thought that I could do people getting lost in a crowd, or standing out from the crowd. I had different ideas of how I could go about this:

-        -  A young, tattooed person, or group, in a group of OAPs

-         - Someone sitting alone in a shopping centre, isolated, even though they are surrounded by people

-         - Shots of people in the same outfit, but in different spaces, in different groups, with their expression suggesting that they aren’t happy, or don’t feel at home. This would suggest that people all have a place to belong, but I would be focusing on the fact that not everyone feels that they are where they belong.

Initial Ideas...

I thought of doing the project based around damage to the body, for example, going to the skate park in Brighton and photographing people, or an individual, and documenting any damage they do to their bodies. Although unlikely, I could also attempt to find an individual or group of people that do Parkour. I could also follow around someone with a disability, and show their struggles.
Jeremy & Claire Wiess' image of a skateboarder is the sort of image I could use:

Diane Arbus' image of the tallest man in the world, at that point, documents his difference to his family, and his struggle to live a normal life.  

Brighton Field Trip

This week in our workshop we went into Brighton in order to practive taking portraits.
First we got into pairs, and practiced taking portraits of our partner, ensuring they took up a third of the frame and that the background was out of focus. While I was not 100% successful doing this, these are the best photos that I took, which do demonstrate these skills to some extent.

  

We also went into town, and approached people to take their picture. Unfortunately, this lead to many refusals, which meant that I didn't manage to get a large number of photos. However, I did get some of people doing their jobs and so on.

 

After this field trip, I realised how difficult it's going to be approaching people for the project, and even harder getting them to agree to be in it.

Initial Ideas

One idea that comes to mind when thinking of the costs of living is old age. I like the idea of taking images of an old person, who clearly shows the years, and what they’ve gone through. I could take an image of an old woman, and concentrate on her wrinkles, on her face, hands and so on. I could also focus on her doing simple everyday tasks, and document the difficulty she has in doing these.
For example, in Hayley Leonard's 'Nan's Hands' (2004), we cant see the woman, but we can see that she is an old woman that looks after herself. She is sat in a relaxed pose. I could go the opposite way to this, and concentrate on her hands when she is doing a simple task that she finds particularly difficult.

Another idea that comes to mind is focusing on a career that documents the cost of living. This could be anything from an undertaker, whose career is based around death, the ultimate cost of living, to a street cleaner, focussing on the cost of people living on the environment.

I like the idea of also posing some pictures, and when thinking of the cost of living, I also think of things that happen to people in life, and thought of accidents but am aware that this would not be something I could organise. I then had the idea of doing something related to domestic violence as one of my portraits. The first image is not as extreme as I was thinking, (taken by Marc Paeps), however it is the sort of thing I would want to do, with the make-up and plain background. The second image is more the sort of image I would like to take, and was the initial inspiration of the idea of domestic abuse as one of the portraits.

UPDATE: I've decided not to do this idea, as I think I would be making more work for myself, and the aim for the project is to get portraits of people we don't know, which I would not be able to do with this idea.

I like the composition of this photo, taken by Jeremy & Claire Weiss, and when taking portraits want to have them in the natural environment of the subject, with the subject not looking at the camera. I would like it to look like a snapshot into their lives as opposed to a posed image.

Field Trip to Stanmer Park

During our workshop this week we went to Stanmer Park to practice various techniques.

Our first exercise was to produce a series of photos of the church. I explored the effects of changing the view point and the focal length. It was a good way to experiment, although as you can see from what I think are the best photos I took, I seem to have preferred on type of shot over others. However, the exercise was good as it showed me what I needed to improve on.

After we took photos of the church, we then went on to take photos of things that spelt out our name. 

After this short exercise, we went on to use the techniques we learnt in the lesson to take a shots of the church and the surrounding area. My favourite shot is the last one of the three. I feel that it demonstrates the use of the rule of thirds as well as everything else we learnt one the day of the field trip.