Home

Our final project is here, how on earth have I got to the end of this module already? I have honestly loved every second and cannot wait to continue to study photography in my second year. After all, it is probably the only thing I have a real passion for. So we have been given our last brief, titled ironically, “home” 

Now, home is something that is different for everyone, something that defines home is completely unique as no one has the same home. When I started thinking about this brief, like everyone I suppose, I thought of the things that remind me of home and, as always, made a mindmap to just get my thoughts onto paper. Here are objects, sounds, that remind me of home 

So the mindmap above is more of a general elaboration of the word home. What most people would usually defines a home for someone. Safety, food, cleanliness, happiness etc. The one below is a more personal one for me to show that everyone’s homes are different. For example, I have had a ready made jug of summer fruits in the fridge since I was about 4 years old, where I could go and get myself a drink without having to dilute it myself. I’m now almost 19 years old with 2 23 year old brothers, yet my mum still makes a jug. So now I’m at uni, things like that make me appreciate ‘home’. Another example is pizza Fridays. Every Friday without fail, my mum will either buy or order pizzas on a friday night and the whole family will sit in front of a good film and eat pizza and drink wine. Even when all three of us kids are out, my mum and dad will still do it. Traditions are a huge thing in our household as you can tell. 

So when thinking about how to link this into photography, I ummed and arred about what to photograph. Yes, I thought, I could take a simple photo of my summerfruit jug of my beautiful cat. But what’s artistic about that?  So me being the typical complicated photographer that I am, thought of ways to show all my lovely home memories through something else.

Ever heard of the saying ‘through the minds eye’? well it’s essentially what it says on the tin. Often, we as people, refer to things through the ‘minds eye’ and this can relate to what we see in front of us or what we remember in our heads. So, with this in mind, I thought about ways I could present my 6 photos through memories and therefore through an eye. Now, of course I could just jump in and see how it goes (like perhaps I would have done at sixth form) but research is key. So my first step, as always, is to see if it’s been done before. AND IT HASN’T! 

So, let me break this up for you, I am planning to take photos of an eye and then put photos of my home inside the eye in order to create the through the minds eye message. Now, I’ve worked with eyes before and they’re a total nightmare. For my water project that I speak about on the first page, I took photos of eyes and edited them to look as though the colour part was leaking. Eyes are difficult to work with and I’m not one for saying that equipment limits you due to me still using a 6 year old camera. However, without the right lens, getting a good photo of an eye in focus takes some doing. For example, I found an awesome eye photographer called Suren Manvelyan who photographs both human eyes and animal eyes. For this project, I have just focused on her human work but her animal stuff is incredible too! 

I don’t know about you but how freaky are all of those images?! Such incredibly photos taken by an awesome photographer. Now obviously, I don’t have a super magnifying lens that can capture every crease in a pupil. So, I got my good old macro lens out to play! As you saw with my found object project, macro photography is pretty difficult but I’ve had a fair bit of practice. So, I took a fair few photos of my boyfriend’s eye. See, I wanted to use my eye but with macro, you can’t really put it on a tripod and press the shutter. And I don’t trust him to get a well focused shot. So, here are my contact sheets from the shoot. I used my usual beauty of a camera SONY A200 and lit the subject form behind the camera. I got long shots and close ups of the eye to experiment in the editing process. 

CONTACT SHEETS

You’re probably getting bored of me saying the same thing, but now I needed to select the image I wanted to use. I was really particular after looking at the images that I wanted the entire iris to show. I had some really good shots of the eye like this one… 

But I just didn’t like how the iris wasn’t clear as this is where my image would be going. So, I finally decided on using a photo I had taken that was a long shot and showed the iris how I wanted it to be. 

This photo was perfect in terms of showing the beauty of a human eye. Obviously this would be cropped in Photoshop but it was just about the positioning of the eye and it’s focus that made this the one I wanted to work with. After a bit of deliberation, I didn’t know whether to make each of my 6 images on a different eye, and this was something I could only really decide after experimenting through the editing process. So now that I had decided on the eye being the message to my images, I needed to decide what 6 home photos I would use. 

THE 6 HOME PHOTOGRAPHS

         So, as I’ve said many times by now, I take hundreds of photos of my everyday life so I thought what better way to show home than photos I’ve already taken at home. This is when I spend hours and hours going through 10,000 photos on my laptop trying to find good images that fit my brief. But when looking at my mindmap, I had mental images of photos I had taken of specific things. I had loads of options to show ‘home’ but I chose my 6 photos that best describe it to me THROUGH MY MINDS EYE, see? 

So, I’ll explain each one… the first being… wait for it….

1. My actual ‘home’ 

So, I thought what better way to start the brief by including a photo of my actual home. This was taken 2 summers ago from part of my garden. It’s only showing half of the house but I’ve always loved the photo. I was actually sat up at the top of my garden revising for my a level exams when I looked up and had a slight epiphany about how lucky I am and how much I love home and even now I look at it and miss being there (and I don’t get homesick). Since the original, I’ve edited it and put a slight offset onto the photo. This was an effect I obviously liked at the time. I love the overall image especially the contrast between the blue sky, orange roof and white flowers in the foreground. So, I’d like this to go into the eye image as this is what my mind sees when I think of my physical ‘home’. 

2. My wonderful parents

Of course, when I think of home, I think of who makes a home. Now, my parents are the strongest people I know and like most kids, think their parents are invincible and perfect. I have a relationship with both my mum and dad that no one else has. I don’t see them as the annoying older me (although sometimes they can be a pain) I see them like my best friends. Their unconditional love for us and for each other is the glue to our family. I have seen a lot of families in my time and not a single one of them has the bond I have with mine. As cliche as it sounds, they are home to me, and wherever we all end up in the future, we will have memories (THROUGH OUR MINDS EYE) of our family. I took this photo in Paris (they took me there for my 18th) It wasn’t posed at all, we were queuing to go into a museum and I couldn’t help but capture the moment, their love. 

 

3. My gorgeous Tanzy Tiger

This is my perfect little kitty Tanzy. Now, I’ve had 2 cats since being born (and about 20 goldfish) but I was too young to remember the first one. But when we got him put down, my mum was an absolute mess and I never understood how someone could be so upset over a cat. Well that was before we got this beautiful thing. Tanzy is like a family member, she has a sassy attitude, she can play fetch, and despite the odd mouse and bird thats bought in, she’s our little bundle of joy. She is an enormous part of my ‘home’ and I just love this photo! 

4. My car

Like most teenagers, their car is a big deal to them. But I never realised how much I love the freedom of a car until I came to uni. I passed my test just over a year ago, I absolutely hated learning. My dad would always come and pick me up from work and make me drive home and I always threw a strop about it. However, when I passed my test, it was a completely different story. I drove everywhere, and I was lucky enough to get a ford fiesta for my first car. Obviously at uni, my car is just sat on my drive at home. So everytime I go home, I’m straight back on the roads. I took this photo (not whilst driving) but it is my car and my mum was driving it somewhere I could practice my bay parking. Good old memory! 

5. Fireplace

As you can see, in my home we have a huge fireplace. We absolutely LOVE fires. We have under floor heating in our lounge and it takes years to warm up so we just make a fire and the room is gorgeous. We usually have them over winter here and there but at Christmas we constantly have a fire going! I often sit in front of it and read or do some work, once I’ve fought off my cat because her spot is right in front of it. Our lounge doesn’t have a TV in it (don’t worry we do have a TV, but it’s just in the ‘den’ which is our TV room). The lounge is where we all go and sit on a Sunday evening with a glass of wine whilst the roast dinner cooks. And the fire amongst each others company is our entertainment, amazing isn’t it? that this could be my favourite thing to do and it involves no electrical items! We have many memories around our fire, whether it be Christmas, games, or just sitting and listening to our vinyls on the record player (we’re a pretty old school family, and thank god there are still ones still around). So the fire is definitely something that is part of home.

6. MY AMAZING BATH

This is a photo I took of a bath bomb in my bath. Now, let me just give you some background. I am OBSESSED with baths, so you can imagine how badly I cope here with a shower the size of Harry Potter’s under the stairs bedroom. I have had at least 60 bath bombs in the last 2 years and have taken photos of every single one. I chose this particular photo because of the bubble that appeared and the colours that are created. Something that most people would dismiss, a bath, in fact I know people that hate baths. “ITS LIKE BATHING IN YOUR OWN DIRT” they say. Pfttt, I don’t know about you but I’m not that filthy! I thought it was important to include things that are just for me too. Like everything I’ve mentioned can be enjoyed by everyone, a fire, my cat, my parents etc. My bath is where I go to relax, wind down after a long day or prepare myself for the day ahead. I usually have scented candles everywhere (another thing I’m obsessed with) and between those 4 walls, billions of thoughts have spread.  So, I couldn’t do a home project and not include my baths.  

EDITING

There you have it, all of my 6 home photos. But you know by now, that is not where it stops. Anyone can take a photo of a cat, where’s the artistic element gone? Well, like I previously explained, my idea ‘through the minds eye’ was about to become a reality. Time to get editing! 

Simply enough, I layered each image onto the eye that I had chosen to work with. I then used the circle tool to get a perfect circle shape to carve the eye out of the 6 photos. I then placed the circle onto the eye image and adjusted all the general settings, exposure, brightness, etc.

Then I decided to create a black outline using a different circle tool and painting it black. This gave definition to the iris and I felt like this is what was missing in the original photos. Here are the photos at this point. 

Not bad right? Well I was happy with the images, I liked the photos in the eyes and liked the variety of saturation in all. However, I felt like because this was meant to be my eye, I needed to make it look like a womans eye. For obvious reasons, I wanted some makeup on there. To do this, I copied the eyeliner and mascara from a makeup model and Photoshopped it onto the outside of Kieron’s eye. This took a lot of time to adjust, I needed to transform the layer to make it Kieron’s eye size and rub out the parts I didn’t want. And there you have it, my final home photographs…

FINAL HOME IMAGES

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I think the images work well to show my brief in an imaginative and unique way. Showing many parts of my home that make it a ‘home’ to me. As I said when introducing my idea, home is such an independent thing and what may seem really stupid to one person, could mean the world to someone else. I like the meaning behind my photos, as always, because the way we imagine and remember things, our clever brain essentially paints pictures of what we want to see. When I’m missing home, I imagine my parents sat cuddling on the sofa, I imagine having a lovely long bath with a colourful bath bomb as company.