Evaluation

In this assignment I have been looking at the relationship between artificial light and dark settings. 

In the previous assignment I looked at night photography alongside architectural photography but at the end of the assignment I decide to use the architectural work, leaving out the night photography. After doing this I really wanted experiment further with night photography, so I decided to use it as the main theme in this assignment. 

In the previous assignment I had only scratched the surface of night photography, I had mainly looked at street lights and stuck to the darker residential areas of my village. Although these settings can produce great images, they can become very repetitive and bland after time. In my first shoot I continued shooting in this style, mainly focusing on street lights and external building lights. After the shoot I looked over the contact sheets and realised that I needed to expand my subject matter. This is where my artist research's came into use, I had already looked at Sander Meisner a night photographer from Amsterdam who photographed the outskirts of cities at night. His work incorporates the urban settings with wildlife, showing lonely trees creeping into a shot of a well lit motorway or the forgotten green land behind a petrol station. His work incorporates such more than street lights it uses internal light from buildings, car head lights and much more. So I took inspiration from Meisner and and began looking at different light sources (This can be seen as my photo shoots progressed). I wasn't just looking at street lights in dark settings I was now actually looking at artificial light in dark settings.  

I started the assignment by using a canon D500 and a small portable Manfrotto tripod. This set up and be good at times, the D500 is a brilliant little camera and to an extent will work well at night but only in the early evening. Once it begins to become fully dark the camera can not handle it, without an extremely stable tripod the images become rather grainy and not to the highest quality. With the correct tripod the D500 will achieve high quality images. 
The small portable Manfrotto tripod is also very useful at certain points and for certain shots but for a dark night shoot it is quite unreliable. Its very stable and with the right stable surface at the perfect height it will work as well as any tripod but you can't always count on there being the perfect surface to rest the tripod on and in these circumstances it isn't possible to get the right shot. It will either be blurry or shot from a very low angle. 
Although the 500D is a good camera a Canon Mark III works a lot better for night photography, it has a much higher resolution and the ISO can be set high without affecting the grain of the images. This works perfectly with night photography as sometimes a high ISO is useful and in this circumstance grain was not an option in this project. 
While using the Mark III I also used a full sized Manfrotto tripod. What ever the size Manfrotto make exceptional tripods but the full sized tripod was much more useful in an all round sense, it allowed me to take any shot I wanted portrait or landscape and for amount of time. This tripod helped me achieve so of the best images from the project. 
The Mark III and the full sized tripod were the best pieces of equipment as they produced the best images. The other pieces of equipment were still good but not as good for this assignment. 
I also used an iPhone 4s in this assignment, although it was useful and portable the images quality was not up to par.

I encountered a few problems while on this project, I have mentioned the problem of my work seeming too repetitive and boring. Which I solved by broadening the subject matter. 

I ran into the issue of my tripod not being sufficient which I solved by using a larger tripod. There was the issue of the images looking to grainy, blurry, discoloured, underexposed I solved this in a few different ways; first of all I started shooting just before dusk to catch the last of light (this gives the sky a beautiful colour also), using the Canon mark III as the higher resolution let me capture images in higher quality and using a larger more stable tripod (this also allowed me to use a lower ISO).  
I also ran into the problem of shooting on private property. While shooting the Nestle shoot I entered the front car park of the Nestle factory I didn't think this would be a problem but to my surprise it was. I was approached by a security guard and asked to leave the premises. This has made me more aware of the seriousness of shooting on private property and that I should always check before shooting even if it is a car park. 

As well as looking at Sander Meisner for inspiration I also looked at the Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey more specifically his 'Based on a true story' series which takes play in the city of Rio De Janeiro. This series highlights the may different ways of life throughout the city and interlinks them perfectly through his interactive book which I drew a huge amount of inspiration from. The night photography in the series is beautiful it looks at every element of night photography that I am interested in and allowed me to look at certain situations in a different light e.g. not only focusing on quite still lives but looking at busy hectic places too. 

I am really pleased with this assignment. Everything that I have done for it has made me proud, the images are too a high standard and follow a specific theme, the artists's that I have looked at have influenced and informed me not only for this assignment but for the future and the book that I have produced is of good quality, the images flow and interlink perfectly. There are a few things that I maybe would change but besides that I am over the moon with the outcome of this assignment.