Final Major Project Idea Generation.

For my final project, I've being thinking about doing animal/pet photography for it. I've taken many test shots and had I think about how I could go about doing it.

If I did choose to do animal/pet photography I'd be aiming to make a photo-book, with captions along with the images. I'd be either doing the full book on my cat, Coley or both Coley and my dog, Bella. The book would possibly include mini stories and the theme of the book humorous images that also show the personality's of my pets because they both have really big personalises to say their animals. The book will possibly explain how we got our dog and cat and the interesting stories behind them: how my dog was one of many in a litter that was abandoned in a cardboard box, outside a Netto's, how my mum had to hand rear her as she grew up etc and how I waited 17 years, nagging and begging for a cat only to be let down every time because of my mum having allergies to cat fur and being worried with having a dog already- to finally make my parents cave in on the idea and quickly find a cat on "Gumtree" of all places, go to Wakefield in order to buy her. Since that day I've gained a best friend and a new room mate who's to my surprise extremely vocal and hyper and follows me around everywhere.

I thought my interesting pets and the stories along with their funny and different personalities would make for an interesting project- but I'm still playing around with the idea, it's not definitely going to be my final project yet.

Here are some of the test shots:

 1) Open, auto tone, auto contrast, crop, levels, exposure. 2) Smart sharpen

3) Shadows&Highlights. 4) Cloning background/cat hair away.

 1) Auto tone, auto contrast, levels, smart sharpen, exposure. 2) Brightness&Contrast.

3) Shadows&Highlights.

this other shot I took of this which my focus isn't right but putting it on anyway, as they are only test shots: 

 1) Auto tone, Auto contrast, levels,smart sharpen,crop. 2) Shadows&highlights. 

3) Brightness&Contrast.

1) Auto contrast, levels,crop,brightness/contrast,smart sharpen,shadows/highlights, brightness/contrast.

What I noticed when looking through all the test shots, I took them at different times of the days and in different light/with flash and without it. The flash pictures tend to be better for bringing out the colours in Coley's fur and also act as an instant light in her eyes, getting rid of dead eye- but having flash means loosing detail in some things depending how it's shot and also can make her squint and bother her. But shooting under artificial lighting at night means lack of light, dead eye is hard to get rid of, white balance messing up if shot with two types of lighting and the images tend to not pop as much as the flash used ones do. Then there's the natural lighting which is rally good depending on if the light is hitting the right place and going where you want it to which in this case is hard because you can't control where the animals are, you can change where their looking half the time but you can't move them like you would a person, or else you loose the shot completely. I'd make a rule that I'll only take images when using natural light or flash but that can't be done either really- sometimes things you really want to capture will happen in the lowest of lights and trying to get the camera settings as light as you can be doesn't really affect it much. I've learned when doing these shots that it's make or break whenever you try take a shot, you have to act fast and have your settings correct and pretty much have your camera at hand all the time because you never know when a good shot could come up.

After being taken through the 'brief' of this project and shown some of the last years students work, I can now see that doing my last project on my pets wouldn't be a good idea at all. The idea isn't strong enough, it probably wouldn't get me a good grade either. Thinking needs to be done.

I did some more thinking about what I could do for my final project and came up with a fair few ideas, and decided to test out one: Person X style documentary/documentary of an anorexia sufferer. I decided on using a square format crop and adding a cooling filter(8%).

first test shots contact sheet: