1. Lauren Barrett A2 Photography Unit 4
Project Evaluation:
For my Unit 4 portfolio, I decided to explore the theme of Fantasy. I
honestly think that this has been my favourite unit out of all of the projects I
have completed over the last 2 years, because it gave me the biggest opportunity
to be creative and have more fun with my work. I was immediately drawn to the
theme of Fantasy as soon as the Unit 4 paper was released, as the idea of creating
mythical characters and surreal imagery has always been an interesting topic for
me, and I felt that I was ready to take on such a huge photographic challenge.
Unit 4 has been the only unit where I have had most of my shoots planned from
the very start, which allowed me to complete all of my physical work early
enough to allow me extra time towards the end of the project to dedicate to my
contextual work as well as experimenting,
which is often the complete opposite of how I
have had to work on previous portfolios.
Whilst I enjoyed designing all of my potential
shoots, props, characters and locations, it was
physically very challenging, as I often had to
spend the previous night cutting out various
shapes from cardboard and then painting them to my desired effect. Then there
was the challenging side of actually setting up my shoots, which often involved
me hanging some of the shapes and letters I had created the night before using
fishing wire, which often took up a lot of my time prior to the actual shoot itself.
However, I somewhat enjoyed that process as I could feel myself really putting
effort into each and every shoot, whereas I might not have cared as much during
Units 1-3, and it was nice to see my hard work build up to create my final pieces
at the end. These processes of creating and setting up cardboard props lead to
me following a sub-topic of storybooks and fairytales, hence the idea of pop-up
characters and settings, which helped to influence my shoots ahead to allow a
strict and recurring theme throughout.
There weren’t many shoots that I didn’t enjoy this
year, but my favourites were actually my shoots from my
exam. I surprisingly enjoyed the exam, and felt calm about
conducting the three separate shoots as I felt I had enough
experience and knowledge to get beautiful results without
any official help. I even used an ‘outside’ model for the first
time during the exam; a young girl called Amy whose mum
responded to an advert I posted on Facebook. Although I
was nervous about working with someone I had never met
before, it actually encouraged me to provide the best
pictures possible and I actually had a lot of fun. My favourite from the week was
my ‘Little Mermaid’ inspired shoot with my friend
Jess. She was able to drive us to Clacton at the
time, which was exciting because the beach was
the perfect setting for my mermaid-themed shoot
and added a greater sense of realism to my work. I
enjoyed working somewhere where I had never
photographed before, and I think the colours in
the costume that I had also created worked really

2. Lauren Barrett A2 Photography Unit 4
well in the surrounding scenery, which really made my final pieces stand out.
The shoot was inspired by Annie Leibovitz, one of my favourite photographers of
all time, and her Disney Dreams series where she photographs celebrities in
Disney costume and setting to show similarities between the cartoon itself. I
wasn’t particularly impressed by her ‘Little Mermaid’ shoot, which inspired me
to do it myself, and I personally feel that the results are as good as they could
have been considering I was working on a dramatically smaller budget!
Other than my exam work, my other favourite shoot is the one inspired by
magical spells and potions, such as those seen in Fantasy films such as Harry
Potter. I did two like this, to show my progression and
experiments, as I couldn’t work out the best way to light
the shots to get a ‘glowing’ effect from the food colouring
as I placed it into each glass of water. I started by lighting
the white background only, and placing a square object
either side of the glasses to create a distinctive black line
around the edge of each glass to make it stand out against the background.
Whilst this did work, the food colouring that I used was quite old, and so they
didn’t come out very bright in the images. I then tried a different technique of
placing the glasses on top of a light-box, and with the use
of some brand new colours, the images looked like they
were glowing, which is the exact effect I was looking for,
and so it certainly brought a more magical appearance to
my work. This shoot also allowed me to create an
animation, where I made the colours in one image fade
throughout the entre colour spectrum and repeat, which I
would say is one of the strongest and most aesthetically beautiful pieces I have
ever created.
Overall, I would say I haven’t had any negative thoughts about this Unit. I
certainly learned from previous topics to keep on top of my contextual work so
that it doesn’t seem so much, which I did do and it really helped me to focus on
my physical photography more. I have had so much fun conducting all of my
shoots and experiments, bringing the dreamlike world to life, and I only hope
that I get to keep-up photography as one of my hobbies once I move on to
University at the end of September.