What To Photograph?

The first brief given to me was on the first day of the course. The title "What to photograph?" was set. The brief was for the class to think of 17 different words and then to go out in Burton in pairs and photograph each of the words.

I decided to approach the task word by word, to think of ideas for each word in my head beforehand, as well as looking around for inspiration around Burton. I believed this was significant to the fact some of my images showed my thought into the words, where as I felt some images were weak in comparison because I hadn't had many ideas before taking the photos, it was a spur of the moment image.

Knowing a lot about Burton from doing the National Diploma previously, I already had some preconceptions on where to go for certain words and what I could look for in Burton I.e - Stripes - Frankie & Benny's has stripes on it's canopy and I had formed an idea of how the image would look in camera before even leaving the college, and something worn as i knew of an area of town with many worn down shops and buildings.

Some of the words or phrases I found more difficult because they didn't provoke much thought or I hadn't seen something I knew I could use beforehand. These were words/phrases such as "A moment in time". I also struggled with ideas for a few words such as travel at first because although a lot of ideas came to me, I wanted to think more outside of the box than something obvious or cliche such as a train, a train ticket or a bus or taxi, but in the end me and my partner did come up with some obscure ideas for such words. For example for travel we came up with the idea for the Royal Mail, or some form of Courier service as they travel all over the country, and ended up with an image of a postbox, although I would have liked a photo of a courier van or post van.

To improve on the images I produced I would sit down and rethink some of the obvious images such as a speedometer for "speed" because other people in the group had the same idea or someone cutting hair for "hair" but within the time frame given for the Brief I think some of the images I produced were well thought and produced well in camera so not much post production work was needed, mine and my partners images for "something blue" "something old" and "travel" I am proud of and convey the words well without taking the obvious route. Time management is something I need to consider on future briefs as I spent too much time on each image to try and make it perfect at first so that as time started to run out I didn't think through my latter images enough and had to use what I had without it being something I was particularly impressed with.