Shadow Play 1' By Stephen Barnes.

It has been suggested by some people that Stephen Barnes 'Shadow' photographs emphasise emotions and most importantly create surreal images. Stephen Barnes also produced strong use of shadows in color however in my opinion I strongly believe that shadows are more powerful when used in black and white phoographs which is why I have been inspired particularly by this photograph. Eventhough my experimental piece will be slightly different to Stephen Barnes photography, I have still been inspired completely by him on my experimental set of photographs. When I first saw this photograph the first aspect I have noticed is that the theme here is horror and I think that's also what I think of as soon as I think of the word 'shadow' What I find so unique about this is the way shadow brings life to any image. The reason why I have been inspired to try this out for my experiment is because during this project I realised the amount of bravery that's needed. Me and my partner have been in situations where someone would get angry at the fact that we have taken a picture of them without their permission. Therefore having a shadow of a person taking the photograph indicates how scary it was for the photographer whilst they were taking the pictures because from a young age I found shadows scary.

Written evaluation of initial sets of photographs

My end results turned out better than I had expected. My photographs are prominent and I think this was because of the locations we have chosen and more importantly the angles the photographs were taken in. My first 5 images are personally my favourite because there is a lot of straight lines. These images were also the trickiest because I had to think carefully about which angles I was going to take the photograph from, and what I was going to include or not include in the image. The editing for these 5 photographs also took some time because again I had to decide what I was going to include and what I was going to cut out. My other 4 photographs was more based on the location. We focused more on places where things were fast moving and we decided to go to 'The underground', 'Covent Garden', and 'Green street'. In my 8th and 9th photorgraph we decided that taking the images from an uphill road woud look interesting which I think worked extremelly well. The images display a lot more in the background rather than having close ups of a number of people on a road.

 1st  developmental  set  of  photographs  

Wri4en  evalua6on  of  1st  developmental  set  of  photographs  

With my first developmental I used a projector and projected my image on a clean white wall. I then told my model to stand with her tripod and camera creating a shadow on the wall so it looks like they're taking the picture. I think the final results turned out good and clear.

With my second developmental set I used acetate and a light box to put images on top of each other to create a more complex picture which worked extremely well.

Overall I have enjoyed working on this project and have a lot more interest in documentary work now than before. My final outcome was better than I had expected. I had to think about my composition carefully which I think I did well in all my images. Eventhough thinking about the angles we took our pictures in was split between me and my partner we still had to give each other feedback on whether they thought the angle of which they were taking the pictures in were good. The black and white images really make the picturee look sheek and proffesional and I think worked really well with my images, if I could do this again I would try and leave some in coloyur to see how that would work. I would also make more research on documentary artist to see the different varieties of techniques used. I believe that the research I have done has had a great impact on my final outcomes and I have been inspired a great amount by my artists. For exnample David Bradley's photo 'Unknown', he takes something ordinary and makes it look extraudinary. The person crossing the road with tall buildings in the background is something you see often but we don't notice. I wanted to take this technique and use it in my work. I looked at locations that are often visited by people and one of the main ones I thought of was 'the underground' If I were to do this projet again I would try and combimne both colour pictures and black and white on acetate to see how that would work.

Project Evaluation