500 critical

The 6 photos chosen are to show how people express their individuality and personality through fashion, whilst also showing the contrast between different types of people. Taking inspiration from photographer 'David Sims' with his unique style of studio photography this project follows the same style. Each photo has its own individual meaning on fashion and how it links to identity, for example whether you are into fashion or not you will find that the clothes you wear represent your personality and the colours on those clothes can also be a representation of who you are and what you enjoy and thats what is trying to be achieved in this project.

Some people also mask their identity with fashion and this is also something that is focused on within this project. There is a growing community in fashion and people are able to express themselves in any way imaginable, and then there are some who chose not to and dress without any effort or consideration on whether it looks good, however that is still showing their personality.


The process in which I followed to complete my final images was mainly in my research; as I said before 'David sims' was a big influence as he focuses on studio photography which is what inspired me to follow that same theme. As I believe with studio photography you can experiment a lot more with the photos. I also did research on the studium and punctum which are conventions of a photo that I wanted to incorporate in to my photos, the punctum was my main point of focus which is an element within the photo that stands out or grabs the viewers attention. This was also mentioned in 'Stuart Hall's' reading on 'REPRESENTATION, MEANING AND LANGUAGE'.

Also peoples mental representations will play a part when viewing my images as they will interpret the pictures in their own way 'we carry these in our heads, without them we could not interpret the world meaningfully'. This allowed people to take their own meaning away from my photos.

I believe my work has achieved the task of showing the contrast between colours and gender whilst obtaining my goal of representing fashion in peoples identity's, my original goal was to have different people wearing their own clothes shot in a studio environment. However my plan was to go a tad further and capture the contrast between occupations and gender, for example I had a photo of a skateboard with loafers on the skateboard, this was to show the contrast between the work life and the complete opposite lifestyle of a skater.

To conclude what remained my intention from the beginning was for people to approach the photos and question them, and hopefully they question them and think about what the images represent the same way I did when working on them.

6 final images

editing process 4

When editing this photo I needed to change the levels to bring out the shadows as the lighting really compliments the shadows in the photo. I also had to duplicate the layer as I wanted to only lighten the the black shoe as it was too dark in the original. I then changed the background colour to a light blue to have the contrast between blue and pink, as blue and pink are opposites in terms of gender.

The photo to the right didn't need much editing as I quite liked the raw image so I only changed the exposure down bit to enhance the lighting as I liked the lighting in this shot.

editing process 3

As you can see on the left I have changed the images saturation to black and white, and I then have planned to change the background to pink and blue. To do this you have to duplicate the layer so that there is two, you then have to select the quick selection tool and highlight everything that you want the colour changed on.




Then select the space that you want the colour to change on and delete it this reveals the duplicated layer behind it, you can then select the duplicated fine and change the colour on the layer to pink and blue.

 I have done this to show the contrast between gender in fashion as the colour blue is associated with male and pink is female and my subject has long hair so I thought at first sight he could either be male or female.

process of editing 2

In this photo I have changed the photos exposure to darken it a bit to have a bit of a raw look to it.

 In this photo you can see I have started to change the colours in the photo. I did this because I didn't really like how the original looked and I wanted a bit of a more vibrant feel to the photo as this specific image showing the colours.





This is the image after being edited and as you can see I have changed the white background nd the pink clothes to more of a purple colour. I did this to achieve the contrast between the light and dark colours in the image.

process of editing

When editing my photos I begin by playing around with the levels and vibrance so I can determine how much I want to change each photo. With this specific photo you can see I have changed the levels. With this specific post I have changed the levels to make the photo a bit darker and then changed the vibrance to enhance the reds in the photo, I also wanted to bring attention to the hamster in the photo because the hamster is the punctum.                                    

fashion community (project proposal)

I have decided to go in the direction of fashion for my project especially street fashion as I feel like it is a great representation of identity and personality. Each person has their own individual sense of style whether they put effort into it or not it still reflects your personality. there is also a distinction between gender regarding fashion and those who seek to disregard the conventions of fashion to express their individuality.

These photos on the left are photos I got off the internet showing a community of people who are involved in fashion. It shows how a group of people come together and express their passion for something.