Hopes and Fears

Mike Crompton

Hopes and fears Throughout the photographic journalism course at Leeds metropolitan university I am hoping to achieve the right knowledge and skills that will hopefully help me to further my passion for photography and allow me to follow the right career path in the future.

There are many different aspects of the course that I am looking forward to such as the practical aspects of photojournalism as well as the technical side of the course such as Photoshop work.

Photography has always been a big passion for me. When I decided to study A-levels at New College Pontefract, photography was the subject that I was most looking forward to. I really liked the practical side of the course and had some experience from working in a practical based subject from studying art at GCSE. The photography course at New College was mainly based around film photography.

We had 4 dark rooms at college which allowed me to experiment a lot with my film projects and develop my ideas as the projects got bigger. The projects mainly lasted a good 4-5 months and by the final week we had to produce a sketchbook full of work demonstrating our research and overall work development from start to finish in the project. We also had to pick several images from the project to be used as a final piece. We could edit the final piece images in a 12hour examination which took place at the end of both year 12 and 13. Throughout the two years studying photography, I worked around many different projects all having a different theme as the title. Each of the projects I worked on involved a different theme which was given to us at the start in a brief. Some of the themes were ‘structures’ ,‘landscapes’, ‘passions and obsessions’ , ‘sanctuary’. When choosing what I wanted to photograph for each project, I tried to make sure that the subject being photographed wasn’t the same and that my work was always different. Over the 2 years studying photography at A-level I covered many different styles of photography such as documentary photography, landscapes, city landscapes, night time photography, skateboarding and British culture. The skateboarding project was my favourite to work on as it allowed me to really express myself through my work as well as through skateboarding which I also loved doing. The title of the project was ‘sanctuary’. During this particular project I looked at an artist called Vincent Cianni. I really liked his ‘we skate hardcore’ project

Mike Crompton because when he was working on his skate project he was focusing on the lifestyle of the skater’s as well as them performing tricks. This allowed me to follow a documentary style project as well as a project looking at skateboarding tricks. The style of photography that I was doing throughout this project was very different to the kind that I was used to doing at the time. Photographing fast moving objects such as skaters was a lot different to photographing buildings and landscapes so I had to gain a real insight into the best ways to capture such high speed objects. For this type of work I wanted to upgrade my camera from a compact digital camera to an SLR camera so I bought a canon EOS 300. I needed a good quality film camera that worked well with fast shutter speeds so that the images would come out really detailed. Overall I was really pleased with the camera and the work produced from this project.

‘Sanctuary’ skateboarding project Throughout the 2 years of the course I went on a number of different trips and exhibitions to London around the country to places such as the national portrait gallery, Bradford media museum, and numerous different trips to London. One of my favourite trips to London involved visiting the world press photography exhibition 2009 which involved looking at all different kinds of work produced by professional photo journalists. That gave me more of an idea into what kind of work is produced by current working photo journalists. I also went on a different trip with college to London to watch an exhibition by Martin Parr who also did a talk about his career.

Mike Crompton When I applied for photo journalism I liked that the course was digital photography and not film. I really enjoyed working with film photography but wanted to gain better skills in digital work to make my work more contemporary.

From the photographic journalism course there are certain things that I hope to achieve throughout the 3 years. I want to gain a detailed insight into advanced photography and what its involvement is in today’s society. Hopefully by the end of the course I will have produced a professional portfolio of all the work done over the course. This would allow others to see my work and hopefully benefit me if I work in the photographic industry in the near future. I also hope that by the end of the year I will have gained a lot of detailed experience in photography allowing me to produce work of very high standards. One thing that I am really looking forward to is the opportunity to do the work placement year during my degree. This is a really good opportunity for me to gain valuable work experience which I will benefit from when I come to graduate. Hopefully after studying photographic journalism at Leeds met I will be beginning my career as a photo journalist or starting a career path in something photography/journalism related.

So far I am really enjoying the foundation project. I like the way that each of the tasks is set up into weeks which gives you the freedom to work in your own time as well as gaining the experience from working under a set deadline. I think the foundation project is a really good idea in terms of getting the students prepared for the course.

For me, the project is really helping me to get to know other students on the course which will help when I start work on other bigger projects later in the year. It’s also helped me to reflect on my abilities towards photography and things that I could improve on in order to help me through my first year.

There are some aspects to the course that I feel could be a problem if I don’t work to my maximum potential. Producing certain amounts of work under short time limits could be hard for me, especially if I start to fall behind on projects. Although I feel that if I work hard and always work towards set deadlines then I should be able to keep up with the work load. Another aspect to the course that I feel I want to become better at is the critique side of photography. I understand that to be good at photography you have to be able to criticise your own work as well as others which hopefully I will become better at throughout the first year. Giving other people advice on what to do in their work can be very helpful to a lot of people so to be a good critique will really help others and me in terms of advice.