It’s been quite a while since I have taken a look at my old photos and school portfolio when I was attending the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology way back in 2013. I attended the Journalism program majoring in Photojournalism.
Though the program focuses generally on news and photography media in journalism, the instructors knew that my career goal was not to work for a newspaper or some sort of media outlet. The knew that I wasn’t interested in reporting or photographing the negative aspects of our world but rather focus on more positives stories and images. My end-career goal is to work for a fashion or lifestyle magazine and the instructors wanted to support my aspirations.
Most instructors would actually assign projects to the entire class and somewhat switch the requirements for me. The grading rubric would remain the same but the supported the more creative outlet I was pursuing. This is not to say I never focused on news media for projects, this just means with more creative projects, they allowed me to focus more on my intended path.
For this weeks ‘Photo of the Week,’ I decided to select a simple image the represents my niche and strength in portrait photography. From what I recall, we were assigned to develop an advertising piece for a product such as food, beverage, tourism, etc, however, I had another idea.
For the project, I focused on clothing, accessories and beauty pieces that our retail and clothing design industry is all about. I had a beautiful model, where we shot anything from her shoes, the bracelet she was wearing to the full body elegance the subject had for the project. For the last couple of shots, I focused on beauty portraits when a magical idea popped into my head and I knew where I was going to focus my creative energy on for the project.
I decided to create a coloured contact-lens advertisement. With this, I photographed my beautiful model and after easily capturing the image I wanted to work with, I went head-first into post-production, cleaning up the images light, sharpness and perfecting the look of the model.
I brainstormed ideas of what type of copy I wanted for the advertisement and how it would with entire image. As you can see the finished image above, this was the prefect canvas to build the advertisement. I have not included the actual advertisement that was built, submitted and graded, but I will humbly admit I received an ‘A’ on the project.
What do you think of the PotW? I have to say I have to thank all my SAIT instructors for supporting my path. I will continue to work hard to achieve my goals and continue to bring inspiriting and conversation-starting images to our followers, readers and clients. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and Facebook, too. Until next week, keep smiling.