For my final piece, I was given the word of ‘Division’ as a brief. With this in mind, I turned my attention to specifically Social Division in regards to the homeless of Lincoln. With the research in mind, specifically from the works of Hopper and Hugo, focusing specifically on emotion and mood, I used this in order to present a rather bleak and depressing mood upon photographs I produced, doing this by turning the colour temperature down especially. This, also similar to the Seminar photo I analysed, acts as a social commentary, shedding light upon the conditions and lifestyle of the homeless.
REFLECTION
In terms of my final 6 images, I am very happy with how they turned out as I believe they portray a sense of isolation and bleakness – both in appearance and ideology. Because I wanted to create a social commentary on the homeless community of Lincoln, I wanted to only include sad looking photos in order to evoke an emotional and sympathetic response. To do this, I simply lowered the colour temperature to be much colder than the original image. I did this because the use of the darker colour, with a reduced saturation, makes the composition overall seem more bland and colourless and therefore create a more bleak image overall, therefore creating a more negatively toned piece overall – which was my main aim here.
In terms of technicality and the project overall, actually getting models for this shoot was surprisingly difficult, as many of the homeless people were not willing to have their photos taken which, in their circumstance, is understandable. However, the people I met whilst completing this project were some of the nicest people I have had the opportunity to talk to, which made the project more worthwhile as I felt like I was almost doing them a favour in helping them and raising awareness for them by creating this project, which added a greater sense of pride to my overall piece. In terms of technique, however, this project is rather simple, although I feel there was not a large amount of skill needed for this task, as it is what is captured within the frame that is most important here. In terms of equipment used, I used a Canon 700D with the standard 18-55mm lens, as well as a 100mm lens in order to get a more narrowly framed shot, with an amplified zoom in order to sufficiently capture emotion. I feel as though I have gained a strong understanding of the use of cameras, as through this project (as well as workshops) I have gained a more heightened technical understanding of things such as aperture, depth of field, as well as the more manual settings of a camera, such as setting white balance and colour correction. Overall, I feel that my project has successfully portrayed emotion through the use of cold colour temperature as well as a clear focus on the juxtaposition between the life of a homeless man and the life of a ‘normal’ person, therefore raising awareness for their living conditions, therefore successfully acting as a social commentary.
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