EVALUATION.

EVALUATION.
For the series of final images for this project, I needed to think not just of the aesthetics of the final images but also the conceptual relevance and how I should put across my point of view to my audience. I started out thinking about issues which are very much in the forefront of public interest at present eg global warming, health and diet. Recent programmes such as Jamie Oliver’s “Fowl Foods” picked up on the controversial subject of modern day poultry production and conditions in which hens are kept. I thought I would explore this subject further with a series of photographs. As well as food production and ingredients of our typical Western modern diet, I also wanted to combine another idea as well as this about consumption and human stability due to the mass production of foodstuffs. Scientists say that we cannot maintain this production of food on such a large scale and we will exhaust our human resources in due course if we carry on in this way. In my work, I aim to combine the presenting of these two problems into one composite image.

For my research and also in order to find further inspiration I looked into product and advertising photography – especially the food genre. Also, I began exploring government and campaign advertisements for smoking adds as this was another area I wished to cover in my work. Although it was quite tricky to locate the information that I wished to explore, I found that most of the ad campaigns use a very simple and clearly defined way of presenting and demonstrating their ideas to their target audiences.
Therefore, for my series of images, I intended to use the idea of photomontage to create single images which have been split down their centers with the source of each product on one side and its final presentation as an item for the consumer to purchase on the other side. Both sides dissolve into each other and their dissolution leads to them appearing as one. For my first photograph, I planned to photograph a bottle of milk and merge it into a plot of grass as this is what it essentially is. Milk is one of the most important dietary commodities and needs a large amount of land space on which the cows must graze in order to produce the milk. The UK alone consumes vast amounts of milk daily. The purpose of the poster is not just to show the actual product and its source but also to highlight the issue of stability.

In the production of my first image, I had difficulty in how to lay out the wording. Also. In this entire series of photographs, I did not use the college studio as I set up my own studio at home using metz flashes and backdrops. I had difficulty on my first shoot with my milk bottle due to the colour calibration of my computer screen at home. I did not notice the backdrop colour variation that occurred and I feel somewhat spoilt the image as a whole and caused it to lose some of its impact due to the fact that, with this variation, the background did not look as sterile as I intended.

I had wished to represent the environment as if it was under scientific observation, giving the interpretation to the audience that it is a more factual and realistic image due to its connotations and semiotics. My second shoot of the orange bottle went much more smoothly as I was able to tweak the lighting better and improve on it generally as I had more equipment available to me, for example the wireless trigger sets which allowed me to have more lighting and therefore I was able to get the right effect that I wanted, The poster displays a quote from Arthur Miller which essentially weighs up the two underlying issues.

For my apple shoot, I had to make sure that I had my props in place – eg the bad apple which I had had to leave out for a few weeks to cause it to deteriorate into the rotten condition in which I wanted to portray it. Before I started shooting, I had to make sure that all my props were exactly as I wanted them to be. For example, the apple itself had to be a certain shape, clean and buffed. For many food shoots, photographers choose to use the fake plastic food as it shows food that is in perfect condition. The only tricky part of editing the apple shoot occurred when I found that the apple had shrunk due to decomposition. Therefore, I had to scale it up in photo shop to make it appear to be its original size. The main purpose of my apple photograph was to show to my target audience the truth behind many of the consumer products we buy and what we are really putting inside our bodies. The first impression one gets of this image is that it would seem to be an advert for a supermarket product due to the font and style of the slogan at the top. However, on closer inspection, the audience can see that it is in fact completely the opposite of what it seems to be. Instead of promoting the benefits of the object portrayed, the poster is actually warning the viewer of its detriments.
The pure white backdrop with a halo of light around the object shown helps to connote to the audience the purity of the fruit portrayed. The target audience for this poster consists of all age groups from all classes of society. For the final image that I produced for the series of images exploring products and their deconstruction, I chose to use the idea of black market cigarettes. My idea was to expose the truth about the contents of these cigarettes by photographing them broken in two with one side being the outside of the rolled cigarette and the other with the contents spilling out. The total shoot and production stages went very well. The only problem I feel that there is to the image is the blending across from one side to the other as if one looks very closely one can see why the changeover is not entirely to my satisfaction. What I feel might have worked better for this image is if the cigarette paper had dissolved through gradually. The slogan that I have used anchors the actual meaning of the image and is intended to be ironic for this slogan is used by the John Player company for their Navy Cut tobacco.

As well as this, I have put official facts and health warnings beside the image I created in order to further shock my target audience. To make it even more convincing, I have used a font style that is usually associated with newspaper advertisements or government announcements. My intention was to convey the sense of factuality around my image as the audience might otherwise have interpreted it as some kind of joke and not taken it as seriously as they should. The overall project has gone very smoothly, partly due to the fact that I chose to do a very simple but dramatic idea.. The main purpose of my project was to create something more related to conceptual ideas rather than aesthetics. I thought the equipment was available to me, but due to my previous history in the Light Studio, I felt that as I had more time to photograph my objects at home, I would be able to get the right image I wanted and also, due to the size of the images, I could use the metz flash sets. This project has really opened me up to awareness of the mass industry of product advertising and the importance of post production. I have learnt through this project how new this form of digital post production is. It has only come into being in the last ten to twenty years due to the advancement in software and hardware equipment. This has made it easier for artists to be more creative and explore further possibilities of this industry. Nevertheless, this has caused problems in journalism photography as some images can be doctored, making their truthfulness questionable