Stafford College (Monday Week Two)

Week Two 11/03/14BTEC Level 3 Extending Diploma in Fine Art - Year 1


At the beginning of the session the students were asked from your theme/ themes for collections, brainstorm possible ways you could capture them.

I then discussed with three different students what they had come up with and what they could go away and do for next weeks session.

Student One:

Body parts - Combining hands and feet with shadows.

I suggested the student look a shadow puppets, and what different shadow puppets they could create with their hands or feet, also to look at artists who create shadow puppetry. They could also look into design and making puppet characters out of card and photographing them in use. I suggested they look at Andrea Everman and owlyshadowpuppets.com

I suggested the student looked at the things i had discussed with them and to collate some research of their own by next week to inspire their own final outcome.

Student Two:

Nature, landscapes and movement.

The student was finding it difficult to decide exactly what they wanted to photograph for his final out come so i suggest that he collated a range of different photographs capturing each theme using a vary of photography techniques, for example to mess around with the shutter speed to capture movement within the next week. Once they have collated a vary of different images he can evaluate strengths and weaknesses to help them in choosing the process that works best to convey their theme in the final outcome.

Student Three:

Storing Crystals in ice.

Again the student wasn't sure how to approach creating the final photographs. So i suggested the student capture a variety of photographs exploring different compositions and photography techniques, evaluating the outcomes exploring strengths and weaknesses to help how to capture the final outcomes.

For the second section of the lesson we introduced the students to photoshop. I took half of the students and explained how to adjusting the brightness, contrast, colour balance, etc of a photograph.



Here is my original image before i adjusted it.




Here is the image adjusted to black and white.




Here is the image after using the levels adjustment:

80 9.99 255

Output levels

161 255




Here is the image after using the exposure adjustment:

+2.00

Offset -0.5000

Gamma Correction 2.00




Here is the image after using the curves adjustment.

After showing the students the adjustment settings using my image i asked the students to adjust their image with five different setting, print them off and evaluate them.

The students were asked to start taking photographs on their chosen theme over the next week.