Project Evaluation

When starting out this project I wanted to capture natures beautiful landscapes but I wanted the photographs to show an intervention of the man made world. County Councils and governments are targeting picturesque locations such as fields and empty plots of land so that those locations can be the host for the next lot of housing development, their reasoning for so many planned builds is because the world is so extremely over populated that they believe that the new builds can "solve" and potentially "end" the over population crisis.

I went back to the same 7 building sites on 3 separate days so that I could experiment with Digital, B/W 35 mm film and Colour 35mm film, the lighting conditions were pretty much identical on every shoot but the overcast skies meant that I could take photographs of the different areas of the sites without the risk of over exposure, lens flare and without the risk of being unevenly lit.

I chose my 8 favourite photographs, collectively, from both the black and white and the colour film shoots, after scanning them onto the computer I opened them in photoshop and converted them back into negatives so that I could use them for my alternative process.

For my alternative process I decided to produce 6 salt prints, the salt printing process is organic which, in itself, echoes the natural world and the sepia effect that is created from the silver and salt mixture adds an old fashioned effect which visually helps my concept of the loss of nature. I predominantly used the technique of salt printing but I chose to photograph all of the prints just after they had been brought in from the sunlight, I was faced with a problem when it came to fixing my images, when putting some of my prints into the fix it completely stripped away and removed any remanence of the photographs from the surfaces so I decided to print the photographed copies onto the surfaces that they were originally printed onto. For me, the image that is lost represents the past, they represent spaces that were once filled with vegetation which are soon to be replaced with the elements of the manmade world, the photographs themselves are a way to preserve that natural world as it once was.

To improve my project I would spend more time developing the technique of salt printing as I feel that I didn't work as well as it could have, if I had limited the amount of variables such as perhaps doing this in my own home where I wouldn't have to risk the chance of the cross contamination of chemicals and I would've chosen to produce the images in a different time of year such as summer as the sun would've been more dominant which would've made the effect more vibrant and the summer sun would've made it more possible to achieve better outcomes.