3) Presenting Our Summer Brief, Nick Bright - 2/10/17

On Monday we had our first seminar in our new tutor groups to show the work we'd done for the summer project. In this blog post I'm going to display the different themes I chose and the photos within them. The themes I chose were:

Kew Gardens: For this project I took photos around Kew Gardens in London because I wanted to capture and celebrate the beauty of this botanical garden.

Thorpe Island: For this project I took photos on Thorpe Island, a space on the River Wensum in Norwich which houses several houseboats. I wanted to capture the sights and lives of people that live there.

Smiley Face: On the surface this project is all about smiley faces I find in my day to day travels, however there is also an underlying message of wanting to spread happiness among people, whether that's through them looking at the images I post, or people noticing smiley faces more themselves.

New Home:

This theme was shot on black and white Illford HP5 400 film, and I focused it around the new area I'm living in, Horfield.

Random:

A mix of five random images I like, two with a theme of my Granddad's garden, two with a fruity theme, and one extra image from my Thorpe Island theme.

After presenting my images in their boxes we all discussed if any of these ideas relate to what I want to shoot for the Curiosities and Obsessions brief, and I decided my Smiley Face project is something I want to pursue for the brief. We then had a discussion on how this idea could work and how I want to develop it further. My notes from the discussion can be seen below.

Due to the fact the Smiley Face project has been shot on my phone for the majority of the images, I feel the idea in its form at the moment would not fit into the brief, firstly because its not technical enough. As well as this, I don't know if I want to constrict it into a brief setting, but instead keep it as a continuing side project to underpin my work and have as a bit of fun. Saying this, I still like the whole idea of happiness behind it, and in the seminar we started to chat about how this could be developed further. An example of this could be capturing what makes different people happy - whether this be through documentary photography, portraits, still lives of objects in the studio etc. After thinking about the any ways I could shoot this project and the broad topic I can cover, I feel like the idea of happiness is quite a good route to go down.

My subject in a sentence: capturing what makes people happy.

I'm so pleased with how the presentation of the summer project went and the discussion of my idea, and I can't wait to get researching about the topic and start shooting! It was also really nice to see everyone else's work that they had produced over the summer in the F block gallery altogether.

#obsessions