Current Photography Work

Hello boys and girls. Now it is time to show you some of the work I am doing at the moment. Usually, my work is portrait-based. I get a little uneasy when there isn't a person in an image that I've made. I feel it isn't visually interesting enough for some reason. But I think these ones work alright. What I am doing is photographing places from my past. At first, I did have a person from that place to sit in front of the camera, but my tutor suggested that a person wasn't needed in the frame. So I just photographed rooms.
First off is my secondary school art rooms. Notice all the over-sized pencils and soup cans. I never actually engaged in making larger than life everyday objects while I was there, but as I got older, the amount of cerial boxes and donuts grew a vast amount. Quite strange. I'm not sure what that teaches the youngsters about art. Anyway, as you can see, there is nothing in these images that really suggests this was a school I used to attend. This could be any school. This is partly why I was worried that these wouldn't be interesting. Same goes for the next string of images, which are from my primary school.



Here we see the assembley hall which, of course, seemed so much bigger back then. There were two classes of about 30 children for each year (from years 3 to 6), and they would all manage to fit in this rather small hall. Oh how tiny we were at that age. I've also taken a shot of the hall from the stage. Everything is how I remember it, but different. The walls certainly weren't this
grotesquely bright yellow. It was quite hard to get the white balance just right so all the images didn't look as though they had a layer of yellow cling film resting on top of them. I also had to tweak them with photoshop in the end. I don't like to do that. I'd rather have them right when I take them. That is where
some of the skill lies, afterall. This last primary school image is of the classroom I was in for year 6. I must say, it is quite different. Yet... not. Allow me to attempt an explanation. The arrangement of tables is relatively the same (I think), and we did have the walls covered in all kinds of brightly covered pieces of art and old diagrams that tell you how to tell the time or where to put a speach marks when writing a story. But that big wooden chair I've included was not in the classroom. I could have sworn it sat out in the hall for someone to sit on if there was no other space. I could be mistaken. And again, I'm sure the walls weren't yellow. Disgusting.



I have left the best for last. This is my grandma's house. This is a place I still go to, but very ocassionally. As a child, my sister and I would stay there whenever our parents were away. I haven't included any images from our room because I felt they were... lacking something that these ones have. This top one is the living room. So much red. Also, very dark. Something that I wanted to keep in the images. I didn't see the point in making the exposure longer so the room looked brighter. This is how light the room is when you are standing in it.The next one is my grandma's room. Not a room we went in a lot, but would sometimes sneak in to look at her 'old person things'. Like, make-up and jewlery from the 50s and such. Also, just look at the wallpaper and the curtains. JUST LOOK! quite amazing. I'm very please with the composition of this photograph; though the dressing table was the most important thing to include, the mirror allowed me to include the bed as well, which looked (quite frankly) rubbish when photographed any other way. This last image shows what you see when you first enter the house. Again, very dark. The stairs are also important. I rememer how they used to smell. Or... still smell