Advertising Week 1: Task 2

We were asked to come up with ideas for our cutlery advertisements and here are the ones I thought of:

For my idea I chose Idea 1 because it would be most realistic and most interesting.

Before taking our photographs we started designing our poster layout on InDesign. 
I was trying out fonts for my poster as I wanted my advertisement to say 'For elegant cutlery use (company name). I was looking into fonts that were swirly or handwritten until a teacher suggested it doesn't need to be swirly to be elegant so we looked into other fonts which could be used. 

Instead of saying elegant cutlery we thought about more slogans and we came up with 'fine dining for you'. For the font we used candara. 

I had my slogan so all I needed was my images. 

For my first shoot this was my set up. As I wanted an above shot of my set up I had to stand on the chair and place my camera directly above the plate to photograph it. I didn't take many photographs because I was pleased with the outcome of my images. As I was putting my cutlery back I placed them onto the plate and decided I wanted to put this back onto the table for another quick photograph. 

These are my final two images from my first shoot. I had some trouble editing them as the white balance was more blue compared to the other image. 

In Photoshop I changed the Levels of the image for the background and using masks I was able to erase the cutlery as it became too bright. 

Shoot 2: I decided to redo my first shoot because there was reflections of myself and the lights in the spoon.  This was my lighting set up.

My second shoot was a lot more different to my first because I had to hide the lights and myself from reflecting onto the cutlery.  As there was still a reflection I decided to lose the spoons. I also had to use blue tac to hold the cutlery up so there wasn't any bright shimmers. 

 When I went to view my pictures it felt like something was missing because the composition of my photographs looked better with the spoons in. 

I decided to copy the bow from one of the images from my first shoot and copy it into an image from my second shoot and place them where the spoons would have been. 

Using the eraser tool I rubbed out everything but the bow and centered it where the spoons were. 

I decided that the bow I used wasn't a pretty bow, so I duplicated the layer and cropped it half way so I could mirror the bow. 

I then added my final image to my poster layout but I made two posters because I liked both of the images I took. 

Advertising Week 1: Reseach

We were given our advertising brief and the product we are going to advertise is cutlery. 
I researched into some cutlery advertisements:

I found these knives advertisements on Google. They are different adverts for the same company but promoting 3 types of knives. 
Profession - When I see this advert I think of a butcher or a chef using the knife because the foods position next to the knife.

Perfection -  This advertisement reminds me of a mother preparing dinner for her household not because of the image but because of the product name.

Passion - I think of a person with a 9-5 job the coming home and wanting to cook. 

I think these advertisements are effective to their audience because their slogan is 'AS INDIVIDUAL AS YOU. THE NEW KNIVES FROM FISSLER.' This implies that they suit anybody. Even though people aren't in the advertisement the images are aesthetically pleasing as they are colourful yet simple, well lit and they show off the product in use. 

The 3 adverts are set out the same due to composition with the knife positioned in the right hand side of the photograph and the food in the left hand corner but the chopped food underneath the knife. 

There isn't much writing on these advertisements but you can see the company name printed on the knives. 

I later found that these knives were part of the Fissler range. 

I found this advert, again it was for knives. This image intrigued me because it looked strange but as I looked closer at the writing it says 'sharper than you think' and I realised it was advertising a knife. 

I looked more into the WMF company and found that they had many different advertisements for their knives some of which are a bit shocking. 

'For those who value precision' is the slogan for this advert but it is at the bottom in very small writing. On this advert the knives are actually pictured so you can see what they look like but the strange thing is the strawberry is bigger than the knives. The composition of this advert isn't interesting but the strawberry is. 

'The art of saving time' is the slogan advertising a WMF peeler. The writing was made with the skin from the carrot which was peeled by the WMF  knife. This advert and the strawberry are more though out and precise to detail. 

This advertisement too is for WMF and is one of the more shocking images. There is no text for this because its up to the audience to figure out the message. 

''I think the photos are brilliant! Once you get past the initial surprise the images provoke, the point of the ad becomes clear: the knives are so sharp that the meat comes clean off the bones. Really, really clever and provocative.''   

This is a double page spread from a magazine advertising another knife from WMF. Again there is no text with the image but they are effective because these kind of images stay within the mind and then they are associated with WMF.

This advert is actually for a piano restaurant and they organised the cutlery to mimic a piano's keys. Its very creative and different which makes it so appealing. The company for this advert is Mirador. 

I also found some other adverts for other companies where they have also used cutlery or kitchen utensils with and they have the same composition as Mirador. They are all very interesting and different in their own way. 

After looking at all these adverts I realised I chose ones that weren't traditional cutlery shots as these have more to them and are more interesting and edgy. 

Zines: Task 6: Produce work

Magazine:

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3ct4aeAbEo

Conceptual Portraiture: Evalutation

When we were given a fashion project I was dreading it because I'm not really into fashion but after seeing lots of fashion photographs different styles I was feeling a bit better about the project. It was really fun learning about old fashioned camera's and I wanted to use them for my final project. I was inspired by Horst P Horst because of his feminine photographs.
My first idea was to do some underwater fashion photography and I decided to stick with it because it'd be good for experience and I wanted to do something which wasn't normal and break boundaries but this meant I wouldn't have been able to use a medium format or large format camera.
The difficult part of doing underwater photography was finding a place which would let me take pictures. But my dad's friend was a scuba diver and he was able to let me photograph in a swimming pool. But I was disappointed in myself that I messed up my photographs by them being out of focus and grainy. After showing my images in a class critique my images being out of focus and grainy matched olden day photography as it wasn't perfected which made me feel a bit better about my images but still terrible that I would fail the project. I decided I wanted to try again but this time at least get my images in focus. That would have to be the final time to perfect it because of the project ending soon and then the issue of doing the shoot on a weekend was better for my model and me. 
My second shoot was brilliant as my images came out as I wanted them to so that was a big relief for me. The surface of the water played a bit part in my photographs as they helped capture contrast and portray the element of water.  I was finally happy that I had accomplished what I imagined when we were told we had a fashion project. 
I was very pleased with my outcome for this project because I was pleased that I managed to shoot underwater but also because I think I managed to capture the Horst P Horst femininity of my models. 

Zines: Evaluation

For my printed zine the reason I chose to base it on Italy was because I had just got back from holiday and thought my photographs were of a good quality. 
When I came back from holiday I put all my pictures on a memory stick and organized them into folders of the events that happened so when I came to choosing which photographs I wanted to include it was reasonably easy as I wanted some from each event. From each event I chose around 6 or 7 photographs. 
At first I wanted to produce a magazine like a holiday brochure, my teacher said like a diary and then I decided it would be a diary. When I think of a diary I imagine a normal lined paper diary without pictures so mine would have to be better than a normal diary because my pictures were the main thing. 
As time went on making my diary/ journal I decided the writing to go with my pictures would be factual stories about my village so it's not only documenting my summer it's informing people of the traditions in Italy and my village. 
Putting my pictures into the polaroid template took a long time because I wanted to include the time and the dates of when the picture was taken even though polaroid's don't have any writing on them. I decided to make them different and this was the way. 
When I had to put them into Indesign it was easy to use the program considering I'd never even heard of it until September. 
The difficult part was getting the pages into the right order for printing, otherwise the project was fun and I think my magazine got across my idea. 

For my video zine I wanted to stay connected with my magazine of Italy. My first idea was to show my pictures and read my stories out loud. But as there had to be interviews with people I then decided to interview my family members about Italy. I didn't know what to ask them until I realised that my mum and my grandma had lived in Italy and then moved to England. 
When I was taking my video's on my camera after ten minutes the camera stopped recording as my grandma's interview was longer compared to my mother's and sister's. I decided to interview my sister because even though we lived there when we were younger and we moved to England she decided to move back to Italy. 
When it came to editing my video's I found the technical side easy as I had used premiere pro before but there was some technical difficulties with my video file type as some of them wouldn't open in premiere. I had to go to the technician to see if they could be saved and they could. I noticed that after they had been recovered there was a popping clicking noise embedded in the video. As my interviews came up to 6 minutes I had a lot of filling shots to take. I started off with pictures but as they were still they didn't really fit in with my video so instead I wanted to show her life through photographs. I looked through old photo albums and couldn't find many of my grandma when she was a teenager or when she moved to England so I found photographs of when she got married and when her grandchildren were little so I included them. 
When my video was finished I thought it wasn't bad but I would have liked to made it more better with animation. 

Zines: Task 4 & 5

Prepare photographs and other source material for digitising and digitise source material 

For my print zine I inserted my photographs into polaroid format 

Before:

 After:

For my video zine I took my videos on my pentax camera. When I went to go put them into premiere pro some files worked but some files wouldn't work as premiere informed me they were damaged. I had to go see the technician and he told me they wouldn't work as they were AVI files. We had to export them to MP4 files in order for them to work in premiere. 

Conceptual Portraiture: Final Images From Shoot 1 & 2

Shoot 1 finals:

Shoot 2 finals: