Harry Woolford

My Component Two Evaluation

When I first received the topic title; mood & atmosphere I pictured in my mind
an image that is moody & atmospheric. The image I imagined was the foundation
to where all my ideas for my photo-shoots in component two have come from.
Like an avalanche, I began to come up with more and more ideas that bounced
around off each other giving me a number of different ideas to shoot.
I worked out in my head what was going to be best to shoot by researching the
suggested artists. I studied what they had done to create mood & atmosphere in
there photographs and compositions and then tried to apply the basic principles
that I had learnt from their work to my own. To name but a few, I was looking for
the impact of: scale, colour, light source and texture. I figured that equations of
these topics mixed up within an image either works very well or doesnt do what
I intended.
I experimented in my shoots and found that scale & texture work together very
well especially in black and white with high contrast editing.
I researched Edward Steichen, Lucinda Chua and Andy Goldsworthy. A mix of old,
young and present talent. I think the variation of time periods of when the works
of these artists had been created implicated my thought process on each
photoshoot a lot. All three of these artists have had successful work and I
concluded that there work changes due to an evolution in trend and also
developments in technology. For example: Lucinda Chua shoots and edits
digitally mainly, and the subjects of her photographs all seem very modernized
like the stair well of a great concrete building which means she is a photographer
of the modern world. Whereas Edward Steichen was a photographer of the early
exposure ages so he photographed using exposure techniques and printed
manually which demanded great skill and was perhaps more renowned for being
skilful and iconic in comparison to Lucinda Chua whose work attracts people for
what is in her images, rather than the quality of the image and print.
For me this meant not only did I have to photograph something interesting, I had
to photograph it in an interesting way. My artist studies are important to the
development of my final idea because they prompted me to think more
abstractly than I was originally thinking for final ideas. I followed a number of
different ideas for shoots and for editing techniques and combined a series of
different ideas in one to create an original piece that has an emotional link to the
natural world, shape, scale and texture, which are some of the key influences on
mood and atmosphere in an image. I was mainly influenced by Andy Goldsworthy
& Edward Steichen because I enjoyed their works most of all. Steichen has such
a variety of iconic photographs to his name and such a broad range of skills;
from shooting for vogue to capturing intense moments in the war its fair to say
he was an impressive all round skilled photographer.
Goldsworthy is inspiration to artists everywhere because he is one the big names
in creating environmentally stable artwork. Rather than a load of high toxicity
luminous paints, painted all over a plastic non-biodegradable canvas,
Goldsworthy delves deep into woodland and rural land and crafts abstract and
modern sculpture using raw natural materials. His work definitely captures what I
would brand as mood and atmosphere. I realised this early on in my research

Harry Woolford
and decided to try and break down what it was that made his work so dramatic. I
put it down to: size/scale, texture and light.

Digitally I have allowed myself a great deal of time to sit and use software like
Photoshop to try and come up with new techniques that I hadnt included or
demonstrated in my work before. I played around with digital double exposure
techniques on images and also tried my hand at creating a camouflage from
collaging digitally with a number of images from different shoots in different
forms.
I thought about building a model with two images on for my final piece, I knew I
wanted to create some sort of sculpture to make a direct link to texture and
scale, which I learnt from Goldsworthys work as being key in creating mood &
atmosphere.
I also experimented with darkroom techniques and made an effort to try and
print onto eggs by using light sensitive emulsion. This tasked proved difficult but
the outcome was rewarding because though I hadnt printed an image, I had
created a textural piece that was 3-D and interesting. The process I took for this
was just a standard technique for enlarging an acetate print onto light sensitive
paper, though I swapped out the light sensitive paper for eggs painted in light
sensitive emulsion.
Steichen would have used these darkroom techniques when he was developing
and printing his works, he would have had to develop his shots in a darkroom
just as I developed my trial enlarger run. Goldsworthy has used the egg oval
shape in his works before just as I have in my final piece, but I have on a smaller
scale.
My experimentations allowed me to constantly evolve my piece more creatively
rather than me have one idea at the start and carry that on all the way through.
Every time I completed a little experiment, a whole wave of new ideas would
come into my head for my final piece which was good because over this time I
have filtered through those ideas and selected what I think is a strong idea
showing my strong digital and manual abilities.

My ideas are relevant to my intentions because they all feature the basic
principles that I learnt from my artist research that create mood and atmosphere
which is exactly what I intended to do for this final piece.
Firstly, the three digitally edited images with the other photos inside the cracked
eggs:
These images are a testament to my ability and creativity when editing digitally.
The moods and atmospheres these images create for me are ones of abstract
curiosity. A bit like Alice in Wonderland or Narnia, where a secret world can be
hidden somewhere as obvious as a wardrobe and a rabbit hole or in my case, an
egg box in your kitchen fridge.

Harry Woolford
Secondly, the actual cracked eggs with the photographs inside:
These three eggs are the representation of scale in my piece. They are small and
required difficult craftsmanship to squeeze in the photographs. They are showing
my creativity by not just framing and image but actually thinking of a way to
present my work that will interest people even more.
Thirdly, the exposed eggs coated in light sensitive emulsion:
These eggs are a representation of texture in my work. The outcome of the light
sensitive emulsion changing colour in different areas is abstract and visually
interesting, which is why I chose to include them in my final piece.
As I completed my final piece stage by stage, I reviewed the effectiveness of
what I had done and thought about whether it was as good as I imagined it. I
have to be critical and say that the actual cracked eggs with images inside dont
look as slick and professional as I would have liked but it would have been a
difficult task filling the inside of the top and bottom of the egg with an image as
well, especially without doing any damage to the delicate egg shell.
I selected my final idea by realising that I had come up with two separate ideas
that were both missing something. I concluded that they were missing each
other, and decided to combine two of my ideas together to put out a strong
effort of manual and digital editing hoping to create mood and atmosphere in my
composition.
I am happy with my final outcome. I have developed new skills and worked out
my ability in preparation for this final piece and whilst experimenting with
random ideas I have created work that I am proud of. I have done just as I hoped.
I hoped to create a piece that would involve some form of sculpture, but also
give me a chance to use my photographic work as an influential part of the final
piece.
My final piece is not how I imagined it to be at the start, this is a good thing. This
is down to me being narrow minded at the start of the exam preparation where I
could only imagine a cloudy city landscape photograph to create mood &
atmosphere and nothing else. But as the preparation came along and I
experimented more and more, the fresh ideas kept rolling in and I began to filter
through what I thought was going to be the most effective for me.
The most important influence on my work has been quality. No matter what I
produced I wanted it to be good quality and have strong emotional connections
to my own work and also the works of the artists I have researched. This work
reflects my interests in digital photography and exposure photography, it is a
representation of my creativity that can be masterminded rather than random.