Exercise: A narrative picture essay

This exercise requires me to dream up an assignment which tells a story.  I am limited to between 5 and 15 photographs.

I chose a subject that is close to home as I am lucky enough to have a neighbour who is a potter.  So I followed her around whilst she made a Raku Pot.  The pages of photographs are below and are best viewed by clicking on them and looking at the full sized version.

 

I had several problems with this task and all have given me an insight into the way I might attempt a similar task for my final assignment.  Firstly, Shrirely works in a tiny 'potting' shed which made it very difficult to get access and light.  Secondly, I found that I had shot too many similar style shots and without enough variation I felt that my article lacked impact.  Too often I had let my shots expand to include Shirley's face instead of concentrating on the detail of what she was doing.  I was forced to do a lot of cropping which was far from perfect.  I tended to stick too much to a portrait format which lacked variety when placed together on the page.  Finally, I didn't do a particularly good job of directing Shirley so her facial expressions are rather neutral instead of engaging.

Laying out photographs in an interesting manner is tricky and apart from a few photograph albums I don't really have experience of balancing them.  I wanted to give each stage of production its own page but that meant that some photos are a little repetitive as some stages involved very similar tasks.  I also tried to put every stage in without missing anything so ended up with a lot of images some of which could probably have been edited out.

However, all in all I was fairly happy with my first attempt and the experience I have gained will help enormously later on in this section.