Work Diary - Shoot 5

Evaluation

When I went on a trip to Rome this year I photographed some stunning places and well known areas in this historical city. I shot some very interesting pieces and employed the formal element depth into the majority of the images I captured. This formal element is extremely effective in location photography as I learnt last year. You are able to get a feel for a place when it is being taken from the end of a road or a location further in the distance. Buildings/trees/objects surrounding the subject can be captured in the frame when you photograph depth, which is why I explore this formal element so much when I take pictures on my travels. Linking it to my advertising unit, I am able to use these types of images from my shoot and link them with the types found in holiday brochures or websites advertising the wonders of Rome. My photographs would work perfectly in magazines if someone were to review their trip to Rome and include pictures like the ones I have taken. You can advertise countries and cities to visit to death through the media, however you will never get a true feeling of a location until you visit it yourself. This is what I feel advertising photography should do if it involves a travel destination; entice people to want to visit a certain place themselves through the use of very appealing photography. This shoot was a very successful and engaging one for me that I enjoyed immensely.

Here is a photograph of the Vatican, part of the Vatican city, which is a walled enclave within the city of Rome. I wanted to capture this stunning piece of architecture from a distance in order for the beautifully lit building to be surrounded by the bright street lights at either side of the road leading to and from the Vatican. The street lights paired with the lights of the lit Vatican compliment each other extremely well as a larger majority of the frame is lit up, allowing there to be more detail and interesting features in the photograph. I shot a picture of this during the daytime but also during the night to compare the two compositions. I preferred this one during the evening because I felt that the dark sky contrasts effectively with the yellow tinted lights. If this was shot during the daytime, the Vatican would blend in as part of the structure with the buildings either side of the frame. By capturing it at night allows this unique building to stand out on its own through the use of the lights that let its structure glow. Using depth in this piece meant that I could portray an interesting perspective of looking at this building head on. It is directly in the centre of the frame, allowing of the focus to centre around the subject rather than having the viewers eyes wander. 

The majority of the pictures that I took in Rome have all been shot with the layout landscape, as this encapsulates a whole setting of a certain location rather than portrait which only really captures half. If I was to portrait this piece, there would be no silhouette of a trees leaves emerging from the left side of the frame creating a very interesting border. This is a very important part to the structure of this image in my opinion because it conveys just how far I am from the Vatican in the distance. The leaves are extremely close to my camera, nearly the size of the Vatican's when grouped together which conveys just how far away that I am. Furthermore, allowing the whole bridge to be included in the composition has allowed my photograph to capture a large amount of setting in one frame. The neutral day time colours of a cloudy but warm day in Rome has been encapsulated in this piece as the tones are gentle blues, whites and greens. This combination works very well together as the tone of the piece is consistent throughout, instead of having the segment of the leaves to the left of my frame bright orange and red. This wouldn't compliment the rest of the composition, instead it would be a very unnecessary contrast. 

Progression

Progressing this shoot isn't something that I am able to do as I am no longer in Rome, however I have also shot some holiday photos that I took in Spain this summer which I will be including in my 6th shoot next week. I wanted to explore other advertising photography in this unit, so decided that uploading some travel shoots of mine at this stage of my project would be helpful and show my versatile approach to the topic advertising. I want to develop this shoot by employing some of my pictures into the 'image within an image' technique. This will be something I do when I choose to come back and produce some developments to my shoots, as I feel it would be even more effective if someone was holding a frame and looking down on the image with a smile on their face, advertising the emotion they felt when they visited this historical city.