Project evaluation.

  At the begging of the project I had only used photoshop for adding slight changes to colour and changing images to black and white etc, so to widen my knowledge of this vast program was something that I was looking forward to. It must be said though I had my doubts as to whether I would enjoy this project. The reason I hadn't previously used photoshop for this kind of editing was because, quite frankly I wasn't interested and didn't find it like “real” photography.

After putting these preconceived ideas behind me, I found myself starting to enjoy sticking random bits of images together to create something completely random. I found the first few “edits” I did, were forced into my perception of what editing on photoshop would be like. But after I had started to do more research into deeper corners of the genre, I found my ideas starting to form, and the work started to flow instead of the previous forceful nature of my work.

The idea of using a blog to convey our work as a sketchbook, I thought was unconventional and quite restricting, after finishing the project I still have the same reservations. I understand the importance of having a wide aspect of learning in the course, but I don’t see how using a medium that you can do less on, is better. For example at the begging of a project, most students will cover or decorate there sketchbook, and there really is anything they can do, some people put tape on their books and write on the tape, others cover all the pages in pained card and write on that. There is no room for creativity when using a blog for a sketchbook, because to do something like that, you would have to first do it on a physical bit of paper and scan it in. The only options you are given are what the background is the font and the where the bars of the blog will be, so not much. I feel like I have suffered in this sense, not of the quality of the final images but of the quality of the so called “online workbook”. The idea for a blog is not to use it as a sketchbook but as a medium to portray your best work and the writing that accompanies it. I think a mix of using blogs and physical sketchbooks would be a much better option as you can show all your work on the sketchbook and upload your finals onto the blog.

Although I don’t like the blogs, I did enjoy the project, the main reason being the vast knowledge I have gathered on how to use photoshop for editing purposes, I feel like learning photoshop techniques is vital and will stem into most of our other digital projects. For example the diorama project only had one application (itself) but the skills we have learnt on photoshop will be with us, for many years.