"Development" What is it - how do you evidence it? (FMP)

 You're assessed on your ability to "Develop" your work and your ideas.

Some of you don't seem to get the idea of how it works. 

There are stages in the development of a photography project when produced in college. The first stage is the Research stage. In the first unit you were given photographers to look at that are associated with your task, in the FMP the task is open.

• If you already like a genre in photography or know there's a theme that you want to work with this is fairly easy, because all you need to do is look at photographers and artists that work with the same or similar theme. Having said, that it may be worth looking at other photographers at the very start just in case you see something you don't expect that inspires you... keep an open mind.
• Generally though, you'd look at a range of different genres with the option to mix ideas from one with another and as your research comes together the focus of the research might then become more specific as you make a decision what your theme/genre is that you'll work with. 
• It's important though that you complete the research in the first week or so, reflect on it and then write up your proposal and schedule/plan.

*At this stage keep an open mind and keep your idea vague, try not to have and 'End goal' or final idea, be prepared to change and develop your idea as you start to experiment with it. Also keep researching and looking at other people's work for more ideas and add research to your work as you go along.

So for instance if you'd looked landscape photography a lot and architecture as well, you still might be undecided whether you were going to do one or the other. In your proposal and reflection you'd mention this and explain that you'd start with both and decide quite quickly what you were going to. You can't do both alongside each other, at some point very quickly you'd have to make a decision to drop one and then develop the other.

Because you've not been able to decide on one theme, you might start the practical part of the work shooting both Buildings in an architectural manner and landscapes in an approach you'd like. It's in your best interest to quickly get both these shoots planned, uploaded to your design sheets and reflected on. One of the key aspects of your reflection is making a decision as to which of these two separate themes you're going to drop so that you can focus on developing the other. This needs to be done as soon as possible. 

We'll say that you've decided you're going to do a Landscape project. If you've done all of the above in 3 weeks you'll be in a good position to develop your work. The important thing is now to try and shoot your landscape theme in a range of different ways adopting approaches that you've looked at in your research potentially.

As you start to produce the work these are the kind of questions you need to be considering and addressing in your plans and reflections.

• Where are you going to shoot?
• What's your idea, what's the work about?
• Who might use it - what kind of photography might it be, who are clients and the audience?
• What cameras are you going to try and shoot it with?
• What experimental approaches are you going to use and experiment with. 

My first shoot might be shot walking from Southend to Leigh-on-sea and the range of things that I'd have seen and shot would potentially be enormous and once downloaded and looked at would then give me an idea for the next stage of the development or maybe lead me to consider shooting another landscape environment say - Woods and Forests? 

The woods and forests shoot might have then taken me to somewhere where there'd been sports fields - perhaps a cricket field and as a result my next series of shoots would have been specifically to photograph cricket pitches only and I might have spent a weekend travelling round photographing 7 or 8 cricket pitches in the area. If I had done I'd have almost certainly photographed the Pavilions at each of the cricket grounds and here the idea is beginning to develop back into an architectural project because the emphasis has changed back to buildings...

The next developmental stage would then to go back and shoot the pavilions only and at this stage I might be thinking - yep this is my theme and now I've got to decided on the best way I can shoot pavilions and what 'Market' am I going to target e.g.' who am I going to sell them to and what kind of photography is this going to be? (Ideas development). 

I might then look at the Pavilion pictures and see there are specific types...

Utilitarian ones like this above and pretty ones like the one below...

Now I might start exploring the idea - "Why are they so vastly different"? Is the design of the pavilion a reflection of the socio-economics of the area? Which then lends itself to an editorial article which my explore this idea.

Or I might decide to create a series of Pavilions like the Bechers towers and produce a typology as a piece of art which might still be about the same question - but more subtly. 

Now that I've got the idea, I'd then return to the pavilions with different cameras - pinhole camera, DSLR, Pentax K1000 looking at the best or most interesting way of capturing the pavilions. I'd also look at manipulating the images, all the while being open minded about what I'm trying to achieve with the images and what the story is. 

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Another example...

You decide your idea is Street photography...

Shoot 1 - "Street photography"... Southend high street, buildings, shops, people, workers, dogs, pigeons, rubbish, old people, youths.

You look at the work and it's obvious the most interesting images are the people...

Shoot 2 (Development) "People in the street"... Now you shoot workers in the street - police, cleaners, market traders, old people, young people, students, road men.

You look at the work it's obvious the next development stage is to go back and focus on old people as you seem to have shot loads of old people.

Shoot 3 (Development) "Old people in the street"... Now you go out and shoot only old people and end up doing couples as well as singles.

When you look back - couples are obviously the way to go, but you see that the backgrounds in the high street are making the shots look cluttered and messy. What to do? Go and shoot somewhere else or ask the old couples to stand against walls or maybe even set up a background in the street? Easy solution - go somewhere else... The sea front.

Shoot 4 (Development) "Old people - couples on the seafront" and so on, all the time you'd be trying different ways of doing this, maybe considering applying ageing effects to the work, doing the pictures in colour or black and white and so on - experimenting with different methods and approaches. 

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The Final set of images "The Finals"

(1). They cannot be made up from a range of shoots, they should be from your final set of images and they should be shot in the most appropriate way, using the most appropriate materials, techniques and processes.

(2). The finals should also be presented in the same way - not mixing techniques or materials. They should look like a set of beautifully presented images.

Click this link here to see an example of a students project showing the development of the project demonstrating that she has tried multiple ways of presenting the work and multiple ideas. She finishes with one single image. 

https://www.studentartguide.com/featured/top-nz-a-level-photography