My study on Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham uses enhanced colours in his photography and normal focus. His work focuses on family dysfunction such as topics like alcoholism, poverty, pain, violence and even love, he makes things people try to hide and ignore a reality, this work was inspired by his past, in fact is best known for his photobook Ray's A Laugh which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily-tattooed mother, Liz. These two have been shown in the previous photo i have annotated.

His work has inspired my work as i could add an element into my project of homelessness showing that family dysfunction can be a reason to be left homeless too. Also i could take real life experiences, enhance them and then put them into relevant scenes to my work, and photograph them as park of my project.

His work makes shocked viewers, as it is unseen of for someone to make something so personal in to something that anyone can view. I also would like to shock my viewers that way, show them things the normal person wouldn't have known of and expose these images to make people understand that these things should not be ignored, cause this one day could be a loved one of them, a son, a mother a cousin, anyone could end up homeless.

For equipment i would not use a tripod, i would rather use a hand held camera to make the viewers feel more like there where the photo is, in hope that they will feel empathy and think how distraught they would feel if someone they know was to end up like this, or if somebody they know are in one of these situation it would really hit home that they need to help them, i would like to dignify my photos, not just exposing and leaving it, i would be exposing certain things for a reason, to help them.

Above is some work i have done, i made some collages from professional photographers when i was researching them, and i analysed a photo from my favourite photo by them.

Leading Lines:
The “leading line” draws your eye deeper into the photograph, and to the main subject. The leading lines also direct your eye to an area of the photo that might not have been noticed otherwise. You have to be careful using leading lines. You don’t want them to distract the viewer or lead them away from the main subject.
Here’s a photograph of Death Valley, California. In this photo, there are a lot of lines leading up to the top of the mountain. The lines keep your eyes moving up the image. Lines can also go horizontal or vertical. Leading lines can also be rivers, roads, tree branches, bridges, or even building architecture: Diagonal leading lines are the most dynamic. You can use them to create a strong impression of movement or you can use them to create a sense of depth. All images are created with lines some vertical, horizontal and others converging. Knowing how to place them affects the mood and composition of the final image. The easiest way to create diagonals is simply by tilting your camera.
Horizontal lines often denote a sense of rest and peace.
Rule of Thirds:
The “rule of thirds” is the most recognised rule of composition used in photography. The rule of thirds states that the photo can be divided into three horizontal and three vertical sections. Photographs usually work better when the area of interest is placed off-center.
This photograph uses the rule of thirds.
The basic principle behind the rule of thirds is to imagine breaking an image down into thirds so that you have 9 parts.
You should consider placing points of interest in as you frame your image.
Not only this – but it also gives you four ‘lines’ that are also useful positions for elements in your photo.
The theory is that if you place points of interest in the intersections or along the lines that your photo becomes more balanced and will enable a viewer of the image to interact with it more naturally.
“Framing” natural surroundings thoughtfully can add more meaning and focus to your subject. The surrounding can be just about anything, from tree branches, bushes, and even doorways. Perspective:
Sometimes a change of perspective can add impact to a photograph. Try crouching down, or moving to the left or right. Better yet, try to take a photo from a different angle.( Anything  less  than  40mm  in  focal  length is considered a wide-angle lens.( You could even invest in a fisheye lens, which will give you a whole new perspective on everything:Colour:

Colour in a photograph can create emotion and mood. Blues and greens are cool. Yellow and orange are warm colours etc. You can also use colors to create certain effects. Like the “wow” factor when colors jump out at you:Aperture is referred to the lens diaphragm opening inside a photographic lens. Depth of field, aperture and focusing distance, although print size and viewing distance can also influence depth of field.


  f/8.0                                            f/5.6                                      f/2.8
Angle of View is the amount of a scene a photograph captures and can be measured vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Also known as field of view and angle of view.


telephoto lenses are for enlarging distant images, they can normalize the size and distance difference between near and far objects.

Shelters

Many people think commercial photography is an easy way to make money, they usually think of some young photographer taking photographs of some beautiful model in a exotic location, and being able to sell the item because they sell ‘sex’, but that’s because they have very little knowledge of commercial photography, and what it includes.
Overall, commercial photography is a service that involves making ‘art’ for paying clients. They need to have the complete understanding of how to target people who will pay enough for the company's products and services, that will still be profitable for the company and themselves by making good financial decisions.
They also need to know how to advertise the things that make the business they are working for special and different from others, while making sure that the business (and product) continues to evolve and grow as time passes; through things such as technology growth, season changes and recession.
The earliest commercial photographers were  those who mastered the the Daguerreotype (the first commercially successful photographic process) there was no way to
duplicate a Daguerreotype. This made each photograph one of a kind, which
made each plate more valuable, near the end of the 1800s the duplication of
images were doable by contact printing. This allowed photographers to create multiple photos
be sold to collectors. This was an invention that changed photography as being able to reprint and resell images is still the secret to profitability through advertising photography today.
Kodak’s new cheaper inventions motivated many to take up
photography professionally.
Readily available digital cameras and low-cost computers changed the whole market. Later businesses realized that a lot of their advertising was moving to the Internet. In the last decade digital cameras have become capable of producing very good images are available for £100s-1000s. Computers are now able to use image-manipulation software such as photoshop and piknik as a free version, the advertising industry has now become very competitive, talent and creativity are a must to gain high prices for your work, as you can easily be changed for someone that will charge less for doing the same thing. Advertising/marketing has now become essential if any company wants to get noticed.


The purpose of advertising photography is to get company's and products noticed, and not necessarily just the new ones, they take photos of an ‘item’, usually edit or retouch them, and print them off into magazines newspapers billboards, and simple places such as bus shelters, just anywhere that will get the photo noticed. An example of this is if you were driving down a road with a KFC near by and you pass bus stops you are very likely to pass large photos advertising the food, the photographer will have put allot of work into making the work stand out and the main goal - making you want it.

Forms of advertising photography can easily cross over in to other versions of photography, such as fashion. All fashion photography is, is photography to sell specific cloths or brands, its just been given its own ‘genre’ or ‘type’ as fashion has took over in this generation as a must-have, so fashion sells extremely well.
There are different forms of advertising photography, such as photography that you see on banners and billboards compared to the photos that are on the items themselves; such as the photo of the food inside, like this tesco’s finest ready meal.