My Final evaluation on Tiny Worlds
I felt this was a challenging project to do, it was more difficult without face to face learning and support, therefore I was learning and developing alone and tried my best without the face to face support, as a visual learner who learns best by shown and watching instead of verbal instructions therefore a lot of the development I had gained up until Marched had slowed down and forgotten a lot of the skills I was practicing in class. I found the “Finding Light” project a hard challenge for me, as someone not used to looking for light and I still struggled with my focusing. So, it took me a long time to come up with an idea on how to set up and an idea on storytelling. During my research I learned about Tatsuya Tanka work and his amazing job on his project which was Medical-Check Up calendar on the month and dates, I chose a similar idea for my own Tiny worlds project and storytelling using gummy bears.
Once I got my idea, I started thinking on how I was going to plan this and make sure to be prepared. I set up different cases to look like hospital beds in a ward, toilet roll to look like a MRI scanner, and so on. I had started by drawing my plan for my 10 final images, I then used drawings to create my set and create my story with the gummy bears, I then planned using natural lighting and using an reflector to help light the set. Of course, using natural light was difficult and it largely depended on the weather. I thought then to use artificial lighting if the weather did not produce a nice bright light for my set. It would also affect my autofocus if I could not light the set properly.
My idea about the gummy bears was that I could use different colours, the colours I wanted to use was like the traffic lights system – green means healthy, yellow means tired, unwell, poorly, red means life is in danger, serious illness and so on. I thought of this because the world is in a crisis with this COVID and thought it would be interesting to create something linked to medical and try to create different emotions in each scene.
I use colour grading in my project to enhance the colour in each photo. I wanted to express a type of emotion or feeling. When someone is ill, they usually feel sad, that feeling is often linked to the cooler colours such as blue, purple and so on. but when someone is happy that feeling is normally linked to warmer colours such as orange, yellow and so on. so, I wanted to make the viewers emit that same emotion when looking at these photos. I used YouTube tutorials for my colour grading as much as I can to help my work improve. I also tried to get the best composition for my pictures as this is also especially important to interpret a story to the viewers. I also needed to make it interesting and nice to look at. Recognize that I need a lot of improvement on my lighting, composition and focusing but I feel my skills since august have improved significantly and I am proud of the achievements I have made. I want to continue to practice and hone my skills when I finish college and intend to not give up taking photographs.