SM Bronze Part A

Participating in the arts

My Strengths and Weaknesses as a photographer:

I worked out my strengths and weaknesses by talking to my classmates and looking at images I took in photography lessons.

Ideas for the project:

My Idea for an Arts Challenge:

Action Plan

To collect research I will:

  • Get inspiration from horror books
  • Get inspiration from horror movie posters
  • research photographers that do horror
  • Look up other book covers for the books I choose

To plan my project I will:

  • Learn to use the studio lights
  • Improve in Photoshop
  • Learn how to use shutter speed and aperture
  • Choose the books

To create my project I will:

  • Find out where to get costumes
  • Find settings and people to have photos of
  • Feedback from teachers
  • Edit pictures on Photoshop

To evaluate the success of my project I will:

  • Ask opinions from students and do a questionnaire
  • I could do a spot the difference between my covers and the real ones
  • Write an evaluation based on the feedback and my own opinions of the project
  • Post the pictures on the internet for photographers and authors to see

Learning to use the Photography Studio

That’s me in the top left, learning how to set up a softbox.
Practising with hard light, mixed-light, and soft light for different effects.

My practice studio images

Learning to use Photoshop

Here I am setting up lights to make a creepy puppy picture!

Double exposure

Double exposure is really good for making creepy ghost pictures that would be good for horror. I wanted to use this effect in my book covers so I learnt to do it in two ways. With the camera (using a slow shutter speed and a flash to capture two images on the same plate) and with photoshop (using layers and layer blending to put pictures on top of each other.

Camera Double exposure

We set up in the dark. We set the camera to Bulb mode and held the shutter open. I asked Kristin to stand in one place and fired the flash at her. Then I asked her to move and fired the flash again.

This picture won third place in the school photography competition. This was made with a mixture of camera and digital double exposure. Kristin does a good job of looking like a creepy ghost girl!

Digital Double exposure

For this method, I took two or more pictures with the same background using a tripod. Then I edited them on top of each other using Photoshop layer blends.

My Final Project

I chose to make covers for :

  • The Exorcist by William Blatty
  • Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  • The Skipton Haunting by Andrew John Bell
  • The Damnation Game by Clive James

You can see my research into these covers here.

You can see the final images here.

How I made each book cover

My Evaluation

You can see the final images here.

Part B

Back to the start