Here it is – my finished alphabet photography image. This task has been an interesting one, and one which has engaged me and taught me some new things.
To start with, we went out in small groups and tried to find enough objects and places in the environment to create the individual photographs resembling letters of the alphabet. This at times proved to be more of a challenge than we perhaps initially expected, as a lot of the environment is made up of either organic flowing lines such as in plants and trees, or the straight forward, logical rectangles and geometric shapes of man made structures and buildings. These types of objects lend themselves well to the simpler letters (such as O, which can be approximated by countless circular objects, or L, which any right-angled line can stand in for), but as we discovered quite rarely make up more complex shapes (such as a K, for example). As such, some improvisation was needed to make a couple of letters. The K of my surname was carefully constructed out of marker pens, for instance.
I decided to keep the editing and manipulation of these photographs to a minimum, as I did not think that it was necessary to apply any over the top effects or similar tactics to the images due to the processes that I went through to capture them to begin with. I feel each image was framed well enough that the letter being shown in each is apparent to the viewer, and the lack of significant editing past resizing and stitching the images together helps the feel of the overall composition. I also think that it helps to convey what I believe to be the overall theme of the project, which is that these are just scenes that may be observed in every day life, but by looking closer at the details of what is there new patterns and ideas can be observed. I think some of the significance of that idea might have been lost had I excessively manipulated the images to show what I wanted to be seen.
In finding these letters, I learned a lot about composition and framing of photographs. An object which from one angle or location may have looked ordinary and unhelpful might from a slightly different position have taken on a different shape which resembled a needed letter. The task also made me think about other photographic ideas such as depth of field / focal length, since using these tools can bring out a specific region of a scene to portray, rather than just blanket capturing everything in view.
Overall I think this task has turned out well, and the images that were captured are of generally high quality. A slight drawback that I can see with the task is that the act of spelling out my own name, while certainly making the result more personal, may have resulted in a poorer image overall, since there is a lot of character repetition in my name and this caused less actual new content to be displayed.
If I were to redo or continue with this alphabet photography idea, I think I would like to be more selective with my photography to convey more of a mood or idea, such as using a limited colour palette. However, I think that limiting the available objects that could be photographed in this way would make it much more difficult to find the appropriate letters amongst the limited selection.