Seminar: portfolio

Today's session was really helpful and gave me plenty of things to consider when sequencing and picking out images for my portfolio. Everyone had different opinions about whether or not the portfolio needed to be coherent of style or colour, and should their be consistency. From what James always tells us our work does become coherent even when we are working on different projects/subjects. Therefore whether or not their is a mix of black and white along with colour that can still look coherent. As long as it is visible to see that it is our own, unique styles applied to the images shown then there is coherency and consistency. I believe my portfolio will look coherent as my best images are created from year 3 onwards besides projects outside of university. As I've now found my preferred style I don't think it would make sense to add other images in that don't think unless they truly are the best. 

Ross thinks about flow and the pace when it comes to portfolios. Their needs to be a variety of images in order to keep people attention. If mixing black and white work with colour I need to avoid small amounts and show a balance. This not only applies to the colour of the image but also if there are any with white frames, landscape and portraits, as well as styles. 

To help piece together out portfolios, Ross advised us to print the images we are more than likely to pick and print them much smaller to work with rather than sequencing them on screen. That way you have more room to work with and can see them all much bigger, all at once. This method helped me with coherency and picking my final images for BA3a so I will definitely consider it again for my portfolio choice. 

We were given 30 images which were produced by Ross. In groups we needed to pick 24 out of the 30 which we thought were the best images and how we would sequence them. When doing this we knew that we needed to have a strong start and end. That way you have caught their attention from the start but leave them remembering a strong image. I also thought it was a good idea to have a strong middle. When looking through something your attention may start to slip, therefore holding an individual at start, middle and end would be something to consider. 

From this session I now need to go away and start picking out the best of my work so far. I may complete images throughout BA3b with even better images (which I hope) but that way I will be more organised and aware of how many images I need apart from the best selected already. As I'm extremely critical with myself at the moment I can only think of 2/3 images that I would want in my portfolio from projects, however there could be more from outside of university which I need to look at. Already seeing that I have such a small number for the 20 minimum I have a lot of work to do...