Ben Stockdale Photography

 

These are my sequence of six images for the home brief. After researching and thinking of ideas I decided on taking pictures of keys. Keys are obviously very crucial to getting into a house or a home and I happen to own many to multiple houses. I then wanted to overlay an image of myself that some what represents my emotional connection to the home in which it opens.

Grandparents House

I stayed at my grandparents house around 4 years ago for a period of about six months. Despite feeling welcome it didn’t really feel like a home to me. This is why I took a picture from several years ago which doesn’t look overly happy.

Mum’s House

This key is the key to the house where my mother lives. This house has truly felt like a home to me and is where I see my younger siblings. That’s why this photo of myself felt very appropriate to place with this key. This home represents family to me.

Secondary School Locker Key

This is the locker key from my sixth form. It may not be a place I lived but it is a place I considered home and this key is symbolic of my time there. When I think of that school I first think of the friends that I shared the experience with.

Pub

My Dad remarried and because of this we moved into a pub. I never quite felt at home here and actually spent most of the time living here almost longing to be elsewhere. That’s why I used a fairly sombre picture of myself to accompany it.

 Student Flat Key Fob

This is the key fob for the student accommodation I’m living in. The student flat is okay but it doesn’t feel like a home, it feels more like a hotel and I spend a lot of the time staying here feeling quite lonely which is why I chose a fairly sad picture.

All 5 Keys

To finish the sequence I just wanted to show all of the keys together. I’m really happy with how this shot came out. I took a number of photo’s like this but I think this is my favourite.

In order to finish my final brief I have decided to do still life of various keys. For this I have researched still life itself. I really like the idea of doing black and white still life images.

I looked into still life photographers to try and get some inspiration. The following is a photograph by Andrew Vernon called the wave. I love the simple composition of this. The glass really stands out from the blank white stark background and the colour looks really nice in the moving liquid. It’s well lit and really nicely composed.

I also had a look at photographs by still life photographer Veniamin Skorodumov. His pictures are incredibly striking.

He composes the photographs beautifully. The framing is fantastic and the lighting is spot on. I love these images. He’s a photographer who has actually done something interesting with the background of these images and incorporated the background with the overall design of the photo which is genius.

Again I take from these photographers that it really pays off to take care and attention to detail to every aspect of the photo, from the lighting to the framing and composition. You need all of these elements to truly make a nice photograph.

So now that I know I will be staying at Lincoln over easter I’ve been trying to think of a new direction for the project. I went back and looked over what I brainstormed on my mind map and I thought more about the idea of taking photo’s of keys. I own about 4 keys to different houses that I’ve lived in at numerous points and also the key fob to the student accommodation. These might be really interesting to take a photo of. It doesn’t quite feel enough on it’s own to make a project though. What I was thinking was combining this still life key idea with the childhood photographs to a certain extent. By which I mean I’m thinking of overlaying pictures of myself from the time periods I lived in the houses in which the keys open or a photo that is symbolic of my feelings towards the houses. Some of the houses feel like a home and some don’t and maybe I can convey this with added portraiture alongside the key still life.

I tried taking a photo of one of my keys to see how it may look.

 

I set up the key in-front of a whiteboard and positioned a lamp near it. I tried a few different angles. I like the last one the best where the key is vertical within the frame, I think this positioning will work well and it gives me space to kind of blur in older photographs alongside the key on photoshop. I will take the real pictures soon and then edit them on photoshop to achieve what I want.

Since receiving the brief for home I’ve been trying to think about what home means to me. I first wrote up some like words that come to mind when I think about what a home is.

 

For me I’ve lived in several places and had many different houses that I go between reguarly. My mum’s house, my dad’s house. I’ve never really had one consistent home until I came to university. I think this might be an interesting angle to approach somehow for the sequence of images. How do I represent the feeling of having multiple places that could be a home but at the same time not all of them feel like a home. I tried to continue brainstorming some ideas on this mind map.

 

So one of these ideas was the re-enacting childhood photo’s idea which I thought was really interesting. I went forward with this idea for a bit and searched the internet for people doing this. I found some really funny and cool examples.

 

These are really fun so I actually got in contact with my mother and spoke to her about the idea. She liked the idea quite a lot and thought I should come round and have a look through photo’s to see if there was a good one to re-enact. This was all going to plan and would end up with a really cool result however I hit a major problem. The easter break was going to be the best time for me to go back, find a photo, and then gather any siblings to re-enact it, however just as I was planning out when to go back I realised my Mum would be going on holiday with my sister which was going to make it really difficult to achieve what I wanted so I had to stop with the idea. This was a real shame. Because of this I will not be going back over the easter break so I would have to find a project for the brief that I could do in Lincoln.

 

For this portraiture brief I wanted to use the black and white monochrome look for the images because I thought this makes really nice looking portraits.

Family Or Friend

This is a portrait I took of my girlfriend. As seen in the development post I took many photo’s of her from different angles. This was my favourite from the selection though. I’m not quite sure why I like it so much. I love her expression in it and I think I really like the framing too.

Self Portrait

This is the self portrait that I took using a timer. By adjusting the shutter speed and staying as still as possible I could get the motion blur on the globe which ended up looking really cool. I think this made for a more interesting self portrait.

Stranger Photograph

This is the photo of a stranger I took. I had a stroke of luck where I happened to bump into a professional photographer who lives in Saudi Arabia. He even helped guide me through taking the picture. I’m really happy with the finished result.