My Design Process

The last design project i did was the last unit of my Photography A level. 
The subject i chose for my last unit was Abstract images.

After looking up the definition of what an Abstract image was i reached the following definition, An abstract image may be difficult to understand and create ambiguity.

After doing a little bit more researching I understood that I wanted to create images for this project contain ambiguity, I wanted to create image where the person viewing them would not be able to recognise what they are looking at instantly, I wanted to make the person looking at my art wonder what the image could be, this was my starting point for my project.

Now that i knew what to look for in a photograph, i went to a local library to find books on my favorite photographers that i thought might have doing some work with abstract photography.

In the end it turned out there were two clear photographers that would be my starting point. 

      The first Photographer was a man called Paul Strand who was born in the 1800's, Paul Strand helped turn early photography into an art form. In particular is was his work in the 1920's which influenced me in this project, he photographed many images with very harsh shadows, which would almost feel like your eye was playing tricks on you when looking at it, his photographs were also very tightly cropped, making it even harder to figure out what we were actually looking at.

      To the left i have placed an example photograph of his work.

 The second photographer that i started my project on was, unsurprisingly Mario Tesino, a photographer that has seem to have done everything and could accomplish anything.  However is was his book titled 'Alive' which he published in 2001, that helped me a lot with this project, he did some really interesting and intriguing work with fireworks and slow shutter speed, this created amazing streaks of fire across a black sky, this then inspired me to do a section of work on slow shutter speeds and the manipulation of light, this also lead me onto photographers such as; Michael Bosanko, Eric Staller and Valentin Gavan. 

After doing all of this research i would end up taking hundrads and hundrads of photographs, trying to use the insperation that all of the previous artis and Photographers gave me. These would then be edited in photograph editing software, my personal favorite programs were Adobe Photoshop CS5 and HDR Darkroom Pro. I have placed a few of the many images that i took below. 

Alex.