Proposal

For my FMP I am choosing the theme of equine photography, as this is what I want to do for my career. I am going to be producing a couple of book and a couple of singular images for my final work, I am going to photographing equine events and also portraits of just horses and riders with their horses. The first book I am going to create will be a series of images following someone getting ready for, during and after an event, I would also like to create a book of different people with their horses, however, I will only be able to achieve this if I can find enough people willing to model for me. 

My influence for choosing this idea is that it is the field of photography, which I eventually want to get in to, therefore I want to develop my skills in it more than any other subject. By choosing this as my project theme, I am able to experiment with different genres of photography and presentation techniques so that in the future I know what I’m strongest at and I’ve got a wide range of images in my portfolio. I am going to be researching equine photographers such as Bill Parrott and Mark Beaumont, I will need to research both event and portrait photographers to have a wide range of research images to work from. I will use books and magazines to find source material as well as research the personal websites of specific photographers.

For this project I am going to be shooting on mainly digital however I would like to try a few shoots on disposable cameras to achieve an experimental effect of my images. I will not be photographing events/ridden photos on a disposable, just portraits, this is because I don’t think the disposable image would be a high enough quality for movement  photos. I am also going to be experimenting with location lighting and going out at in the daytime and night time to get some portraits with just a spotlight on the horse; this will help develop my skills of using lighting outside of the studio. I am hoping to have photoshoots for approximately the first four weeks as I have lots of people who may be willing to model for me who are only available on certain weekends, this then gives me around 4 weeks to edit and finalise my images.

In order to critically review and evaluate my work I will be asking people who own horses to take a look at my books and final images and see if they would buy them and if not what I could improve on; I will be doing this throughout the project so that I can improve my images and get the best end result I possibly can. I will ask these people write down my work’s strengths and areas for improvement so I have written evidence of the critiques. I will also be asking my classmates for their feedback on the more technical aspects of my photography that non-photographers perhaps wouldn’t pick up on.