This project is called Narrative and sequence, we have been asked to create 5 images and final prints, the images will be inspired by fine art contempary photography. we will use different skill that we will learn through out the semester to create are final prints showing what we have learnt and utilizing the new skills we have, we will shoot with different studio styles and possibly have an analog element in our project. we will look at diversifying income by selling prints and the different way to do so whether its online through your own website or through an established gallery. at the end we will all collectively choose one image that we will display as part of an exhibition open to the public.

Generating income, selling prints 

There are many ways in which a professional photographer to sell their prints. prints cane be sold personally through your own website, or through displaying them in local businesses, they could also be sold through established galleries.

Your own website: most photographers will have their own websites that acts like an online portfolio where they can display and market their own work, this is aslo a way in which a photographer could sell their own work however its important to remember that it will be up to the photographer to deal with and hand they're own print requests, you will have to do all the hard work yourself however you are in complete control of the process.

Third party online shops: You could use online ecomers shop to sell your work such as etsy this is a pre created website where people will sell their own unique work, you will still have to handle the shipping and printing but you don't have to build and maintain your own website.

Local Businesses: some local business like to support local artists and you can enquire about possibly displaying some of your print in this shop, normally it will be cafes or pubs, its a nice way to get your work out there and have it seen by people who maybe wouldnt see it otherwise, again you will have to manage your own prints and you would likely have to frame your work yourself but it will help you and your craft while also helping to support local businesses in a way 

Established Galleries: you can always contact local or bigger galleries and see if you can display your work or hold a exhibition, in most cases you will have to pay a fee unless they gave personally seeked you out rather than you contacting them, however this is a very could way to get your work out there on a big scale reaching more people and getting your name to ore established art collectors and giving you a wider audience. galleries will normally have a good idea what market trends are and will have a established customer base to draw apon in order to help sell your work. galleries are the most professional way to sell your work and can open up many different avenues for selling your work.

After researching and looking into the different ways someone could sell their prints i have determined I would do it in a why that combines different methods to best get my name out there and make myself known as well as generating some revenue for myself.  The first way in which i would sell my work is through a website, more specifically my own website (liamwallacephotography. ) This is a website a started at the start of my photography career as a way of having an online portfolio as a way of getting my work out there to many more people as it can be accessed by anyone anywhere at any time however i would have to tweak it a little bit as i do not have a way for people to buy from the site, i do have an area with my contact information and message box where someone could contact me to enquire about a print, however it makes more since to make it as easy as i possibly could for my clients. this method would be somewhat passive for me, i would just need to maintain the website and watch out for any contact which is something i already do as it is my portfolio and therefore is a extinction of me and my work. the other way i would like to sell my work is through established galleries' this would be a little more difficult to achieve and would require a lot of work, i would need to already have made something in terms of a name for myself and be known by people within the industry and have contacts with some curators, this is something i can achieve if i put the work into. i would like to sell my work this way as its on a bigger scale and would get my art to a whole different audience that maybe would not have seen it otherwise, with the help of galleries' i could then get put in touch with art collectors or other galleries' that would like to buy my work and that's something i think would be fantastic for my career but could be quite difficult on my own. In summary i would use my own website and galleries' together, id start with just my website to create a following and get my name out there and once i have some credibility i would contact some galleries' to show my work and hold exhibitions using my work.  

Pricing my Prints? when it come to pricing prints you have to take into account many different factors such as how much work went into making it, the demand for the photographer's work, the print's rarity, its quality and the size of the print. as well as this its important to remember a casual buyer isn't going to want to spend more that £250 per print, its only when you start making a name for yourself and begin to get noticed by collectors and galleries' that your work become more valuable. as my prints will vary in size and my price of printing will defer through the years it is hard to say exactly what i will charge for my prints as i wont i have a set price, a series of images that has more copies well cost less for example if i do a shoot and produce a limited number of prints like 10 then buying a print from that series will cost more than a series that has over 100 copies. at the beginning of my career i will sell prints at a cheaper price possibly A3s at £80, A2 at £150 and A1 at £250. I will always print on quality paper however will typically use premium Satan as it is my favourite what i feel my style of work looks best on, however can use other papers if the print would look better on a different kind of paper.

My plan

For my fine art piece i would like to use paintings from the Renaissance time giving the feeling of those famous French painters like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and so on. i would like to use a big bouquet of flowers in a nice clay vase against a black back ground. i will either do this in the studio at Ravensbourne or will create my own studio at home, whatever better suits my project. the narrative of my shots with be death or dying as i would like to photograph the process of the flowers drying out weakening and dying, as well as this I'm going to dress my set and around the flowers with different foods like colourful fruits and cheeses to add my colour and more contrast, i would also like to see if these mold too but there may not be enough time as they will take a while to rot and mold. the lighting set up i will use will either be natural day light or a spot light using a snoot which i will book out from the kit store. i would like to do both, on top of this i might shot on film as well to see how it turn out and practise. 

Call sheet 

Risk assessment 

Model Release Form 

Estimate 

Invoice 

Mood Board 

Certificate Of Authenticity 

Lighting diagrams 

Test Shoot Contact sheet 

Actual shoot contact sheet 

Chosen images unedited 

Final images Edited 

the first thing i had to do was adjust my crop on the images to make them appear all at the same leave and height i did this by using the geometry adjustment window and adjusting the y-offset until my 5 images were as level as i could make them. next as i wanted all my images to look the same i had to make sure i edit them the same way, to do this i only edited one and then copied the edit on to the other 4, this was easy as the lighting didn't change or if it had changed it was only ever so slightly and  small adjustment to the edit was all that was needed. to achieve my final look i did not have much edits to make i simply added some contrast (+11) i took the high lights down (-25) next i took the shadows down to (-8) i brought both the black and whites up to an equal amount (both +23) finally i warmed up the image slightly and finally added a slight vignette to emphasize the spotlight effect i wanted. all i had to do now was copy the edits, save as a preset and apply to the other 4 images. 

Conclusion 

What went well? over all i feel that this breif went very well for me and i enjoyed it a lot, it was fun to do something i normally wouldnt have done as ive never really thought of fine art photography as a career but after do some fine art work and researching more into the industry i feel its something id like to persue further, i enjoyed the amount of creative freedom i had, from the very start it was my idea and my narative i wanted to tell i didnt have to follow a specific brief or shoot with a certain style to match a clients style, it was my style and i really enjoyed that fact. from the start of this brief i had an idea of what i wanted to do and had a few ideas floating around and finally settled on flowers and the process of them dying and wilting, this allowed m to look at some photographers that i typically wouldnt have researched as i usually stick to street photography or automotive photography. i feel i managed my time very well with this brief, some tings happened later than i planned and in a different way but over all i have kept ontop of my work filling out my behance everyday shooting within schedual and having my pints ready by the dead line for both the exhabition at the photobook caffe and for our final deadline on the 15th 

what didnt work? My origional plan had to change on two different occations due to time contraints, the first change i had to make was the subject, origionally i had planned to have a bowl of fruit and photograph the process of the fruit changing colour, rotting and eventally decomposing however that wouldnt not have been possible to do correctly within the time frame we had for this brief, therefore i change the subject to flowers and kept the idea mostly the same but just changed it to the process of them drying up and wilting. i still had some form of a time constraint with the flowers as they were not drying up and wilting fast enough and in a satisfying way so i combatted this by putting them in the mircowave to dry the out quicker. the other big change i made during this brief was the location where i was going to shoot the flowers, origionally i had planned to do the shoot at home in the back garden however due to lighting constraints as i didnt have powerful enough lights at home i was having issues, i decided i would book out lighting from kit store however i couldnt book them out for long enough and by the time they would be avielable to me i would have been running out of time to edit and send them off to print, therefore i decided i would use the studio one day while we where in class and use the lights and blackdrops avielbe there. this ended up working in my favour as it allowed me to get the shot i needed and have it look very professional with the correct ISO shutter speed and aperture and nothaving to sacrofise quaity in order to gain the correct exposure.

what would you change? if i were to do this project i again i would start to shoot a lot sooner than i did, i would also use the studio from the strt instead of trying to create my own in my house as i do not have the correct equipment to set one up correctly and professionally. another thing I would change is doing multiple different shoots using different and more complex lighting set ups instead of ony having one composition with a relativly simple lighting set up. lastly for my actual shoot i did not use a tripod and that gave me problems when i was in post as i had to chnage the position of the flowers in post to make the sequence move in a more coherant way.

other than that i did really enjoy this brief and do think my final shoot went well and am very happy and proud of my final shots