Concept
The fourth brief, entitled Home, was a lot more open to what could be done. Not being given a specific brief, other than that the images I produced had to resemble the theme of ‘Home’, forced me to be a lot more creative. Being unable to travel home and create a series of photographs of my house and the surrounding areas, meant that I had to use what I had available to me in Lincoln to create something that resembled what ‘home’ meant to me.
Having previously lived in a very rural area, opposite woodland and fields, moving to Lincoln was a big step as I was now in the heart of a very busy and bustling city. Being surrounded by somewhere with tourist attractions, new businesses and an exciting and captivating night life, meant that I was in a very new environment. The idea of ‘home’ did not spring to mind when I thought of Lincoln, as I had only been living here for a couple of months upon receiving the brief, and I do not consider it my ‘home’ as opposed to my place of current residence.
I began by thinking about what areas of Lincoln reminded me of home the most, and was lead to a lot of the rural areas and parks, as they reminded me of the countryside back home. This was relevant as I had previously done a lot of experimentation around Lincoln, looking at using the golden hour as natural light in a selection of parks and greener areas.
Research
Upon deciding that I wanted to work on landscape photography to look at the greener areas surrounding me in Lincoln, I decided to look at various landscape photographers. A photographer that immediately caught my attention was Patrice Scott, a photographer based in Yakima County, Washington (USA). Scott’s work is very relevant to the theme of home, stating that “family, music, art, garden [and] travel” are the things she is most interested in shooting. Scott tries to capture what she sees to the best of her ability, which often is only mobilography. Her photographs usually show a variety of greenery or landscapes around her home town and local area, with absolutely no editing in post-production. Her photographic ethos is to show exactly what is there without adding or taking away any elements of the scene, celebrating the beauty in the natural surroundings. Scott’s choice of framing is to have her photos at a 1:1 dimension which, while interesting, I think can crop out some elements of the landscape. In my final photos, only one of them follows Scott’s framing choices as I believe it fit the image best. I agree that Scott’s photography does have a natural beauty to it, although in my later work, I decided to bring out a lot more vibrance and saturation in the images. I did not, however, change any of the original image or added/subtracted parts of it, and instead kept the natural landscape just with an increased colour range in the final images.
Another photographer whose work I found to be particularly interesting, was that of Matthew Schueller, a photographer based in Lincoln, Nebraska. His landscape photos are edited a lot more than Scott’s but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are overdone or make the image look false. I enjoyed looking at Schueller’s work as it also perfectly captures the photographer’s perspective, although in a way that preserves the environment in a more professional way. However, while I do think that the images Schueller has captured look of a higher quality than Scott’s, I don’t think that the reduced vibrance in Schueller’s images really shows the landscape for how it really appears. Only one of the below images really does show the saturation of the landscape, and in my final pieces, I wanted to show a very vibrant – yet also realistic – series of images. Schueller also has no particular choice when it comes to dimensions and framing, cropping his images in a wide variety of ways. For my final piece, I wanted to try and keep all the images to one set form, as this would keep the house style the same across all the whole collection. In my actual final images, this was not the case, but most of the images follow this rule.
Finally, I also looked at the photography of Justin Minns, a photographer that explores parts of the UK and takes photos of whatever beauty in the surroundings he can find. I was drawn to Minns’ work as his photos (shown below) portray the locations he shoots in a much more natural way. Unlike Scott, Minns uses a much more professional camera, which allows his work to be of a higher quality, yet doesn’t work in the same way as Schueller, leaving less editing on his photos. Minns photos are a lot more saturated than the other two artists that I have looked at, and while it must be said that Minns does do some work in post-production, it is nowhere near as obvious as the work that Schueller does. Of the three photographers, Minns is the only one based in the UK, so his work is the most similar to the sort that I would like to produce for the final brief. His shots of the British countryside – the below collection is solely from the Home Counties – are of a very good quality and do remind me the most of ‘home’, which lead for him to be a large inspiration into my final images.
Shooting Locations
Considering that I was mainly being drawn to create an image in the style of Justin Minns, the locations about Lincoln that I had been looking at would not be suitable. In order to portray the countryside as sprawling and stretched out, I headed along the route of the now-gone Lincolnshire Loop Line, which lead me out of Lincoln to Washingborough. Being surrounded by the countryside here allowed for me to be able to achieve many more shots that I wouldn’t have been able to solely in the city. While, not all of my shots below are of the quality I would want to put into my final piece, it did allow me to experiment with the location and see what I could capture. Unlike the work of Justin Minns though, a lot of my images did go through post-production editing to bring them to the quality that is presented below.
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