AD5807: Evaluation

Evaluation of When Saturday Comes:

I have chosen to focus my photo book on fans of football, surrounding the project around “match day”. I ended up walking around and taking photos at Cheltenham Town Football Clubs stadium, The Johnny-Rocks Stadium and around Aston Villa Football Clubs Stadium, Villa Park. The successful parts of these photoshoots were the number of photos I got and how mixed these were. This is because got some shots of crowds, shots of people walking and photos where people were looking into the camera, some of these being candid and some of these where people have stood and posed. The struggles with this photo project were mainly time management. To improve this, I think that I should have started the project earlier so that I was able to attend more matches and therefore come out with more content and a wider variety of different fans from different clubs.

I came to the decision on what photos to include in my final work by looking though all the photos in critiques and concluding what photos went together the best to sum up the project and subtly show what the project is on. I also concluded that the photos worked better in black and white over colour to keep focus on the supporters.

The work that I have produced reflects my research because I have been researching into different photographers who have created photo projects on fans of football clubs. Each of these photographers had a slightly different style of photos but however still produced similar work overall. I have been inspired by these and used different techniques from all these projects by focusing on multiple fans or close in on one. I have intended to still make my project look like “my own style” by keeping a mix of shots. I also found looking at various styles of photobooks helpful to create my own book where I was happy with the style of it and how I sequenced the book. I think that photo books are a good medium in showing the work of a photographer because it is a way to physically keep all the photos together in one place.

I chose to sequence my photos by having a pattern of the photos which could be considered busier followed by the quieter photos to break up the repetition of photos looking the same. Within this pattern I have also broken up the more candid photos, the photos of people walking and the more portraiture style of photos. I have done this because I think this will help to keep the interest of people viewing the project as it, I have attempted to not repeat any of similar looking photos. Across my book I have varied the sizes of the photos and how many photos are across a double page spread keeping some double pages with just one photo. I have done this because I like this kind of aesthetic to keep the interest of people when looking at photo books.

While working with Abobe InDesign I came across some struggles when making some of the photos the same size as I had to crop some down so that they could be the same size, this wasn’t too much of an issue in the end as I was still able to keep what the main focuses of the photos are on the photo. This has taught me that next time before putting the photo book together I will ensure that the photo sizes are correct for the pages of my book. I also struggled with how to put the book together. However, I am happy with the outcome of the book.

I chose the title for this project to be “When Saturday Comes” because a lot of football matches are on a Saturday and going to these matches may be a regular thing to do for some of these football fans. On my front cover however, I have used a photo which isn’t as obvious that the book is on football fans unless people were to recognise the logos and scarf patters. However, I still have kept the photo in on the cover in black and white to keep the focus on the people involved in the support towards these clubs.

In conclusion I am happy with the outcome of my photo project and feel as though I have shown the different types of fans and I have shown other elements showing what a match day feels like. I want to continue this project as either a third-year project or just a personal project so that I can expand the number of clubs I am looking at and looking at clubs with bigger fan bases where there may be more people and more of an atmosphere.