Evaluation

Evaluation

The Build up

When we first got the assignment brief all of the topics available to us appealed to me in some way, however I struggled to think of ideas to do for them, apart from one of them, The Build Up I knew exactly what to do for that subject in particular as I would be attending the final game of the Sky Bet Championship football league season between Yeovil Town FC and Middlesbrough FC. My initial plan was to take pictures of fans around me as the see of Middlesbrough red filled up around me, however due to how Huish Park was set up it had a standing and seated sections for away fans, being in the roofed seated area it provided me with the perfect photo opportunities as we were to the right side of the standing section, so I was easily able to get photos of the inevitable sea of red being formed and building up.

Due to restrictions on cameras inside football stadiums I was unable to use my digital SLR camera and therefore I had to use my phone, however this 2014 and cameras on phones can easily stand up to a full on digital camera. I took my photos from 2 different positions within the ground, I took them from stood in my seated position and also went down to the pitch side barrier and took some from down there. Obviously due to the event being outside I had no control over the lightening, however luckily it was sunny all day, and the sun was also coming from behind me so it didn’t mess with any of my photos and left the open stand perfectly exposed.

As research I looked at a few time-lapse videos of stadiums filling up on YouTube and found some fan photos on Pintrest. I didn’t do much planning as I knew my dad would be setting off about 3-4 hours before kick off and I knew that would be enough time for us to get there at least between 2 too an hour and a half before kick off. Some things I took into consideration was if I would have enough free memory on my phone for the photos but I made sure before we left that I did and it was all top.

I edited my photos in Photoshop, I didn't

do much in adjustments to the photos besides cropping them so that the stand and fans where the centre of the image. For my 2 main pieces I made collages in Photoshop using a set of photos from outside the stadium and the journey to Yeovil and a set of images from inside the ground. For the set outside the ground I used the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop to smoothly blend all the images together on one big blank canvas. For the second collage I put all the cropped photos together around a big centre image that was taken just before the game kicked off, that big centre piece was the most edited photo as it included a transparent Middlesbrough crest, transparent photo of manager Aitor Karanka and a quote that he regularly uses in post game interviews.

Overall I feel that this assignment as pushed me creatively and tested my abilities, due to this my skills in Photoshop have improved a little bit. If I could of changed anything it would probably be setting up a camera in one position so that the photos were all similar rather then them being taken from 2 different locations.

Overall I really like how these have turned out and feel like they are something you would see in a professional practice and for this I am very happy.