picture diary.

For this unit I was asked to create a picture diary made up of a series of photographs, which would demonstrate a story of some sort. Initially I was given out certain tasks to carry out, for example, write a list of potential people, events or locations I could photograph. Once I got the brief the first person that popped into my head was my nanna, straight away that’s what I knew I wanted my picture diary to be based on, obviously I came up with other ideas as a backup plan, but I was so focused on making a successful project on my nanna. I just had to think about what I wanted to take photos of... my nanna visits my house every Tuesday and Wednesdays, when she’s round she basically looks after me and my sister, brings us food, irons our clothes, tidies our rooms, washes our dishes, the lot. Which we are more than grateful for and we both know it’s unfair on her to run after us all the time but we’ve just gotten so used to it now that it's just became to norm. So initially I wanted to base my picture diary on all of those things I listed, capturing her doing the dishes and all the things she does when she’s at my house, but there’s so much more to my nanna than cleaning up for two bone idol kids. So I took this opportunity to stay at my nans a few times during the winter holidays, because I don’t go there as often as I should, probably because I’ve got used to seeing her every Tuesday and Wednesday. My nanna lives with her mam, on Sunderland Road, which she has done ever since I was born, so instead of actually taking photographs of my nan, I chose to take images of things dotted around her house which were of some importance to her, which she’d had for a long time. 

We’d sit for hours going through her cupboards looking through old newspapers and photographs from when she was at school, I heard some amazing stories while we were doing so, I’ve had a great time doing this project simply because I got to spend it with her, and hear about all the things she got up to as a kid, and stories about how my dad was when he was my age. In terms of actually capturing the photos, at times I had some trouble, the lighting wasn’t great meaning I had to turn my ISO all the way up to 1600, which obviously resulted in some of my images not being as crisp as I would have liked them to have been. At the time of my first few shoots I left my tripod at home, so after the new year I went and stayed at my nannas again, this time bringing the tripod so that I could lower the ISO, whilst using a slower shutter speed to try and get that crispness back. I’m more than happy with the results of my final photographs, I think there’s one, which isn’t of the quality of the others, so I might have to reshoot that one, or go over it again and re-edit it. But other than that, the feedback I’ve received from friends and family on my photos have been fantastic, obviously there’s a hint of biased behaviour going on when I ask friends and family what they think, but I think I can trust them to tell me their honest opinion on my work, so I’ll take their word for it.