Evaluation

My project is on the community of allotments, specifically Midwinter allotments. Midwinter is the name of cluster of allotments plots near to where I live, that I wanted to photograph for my community project.

At the start of the project, I had no idea what I wanted to shoot, where I wanted to go or who to contact. It took a very long time to gather ideas and work out what kind of community I wanted to focus on. After a little help from my course, my mother and my tutor I came up with the idea of photographing an allotment. This is because it’s something that’s quite personal for me, my mother has an allotment back at home so I had a little bit of background knowledge about what they were like and what to expect.

I found 2 photographers’ that had previously done projects on allotments for my artist research, Andrew Buurman and Paul Tucker.

Buurman’s work, named ‘Allotment: a peopled landscape’, was more focused on the communities of allotments and the different plot holders. How diverse each one is, but how they all have the same enthusiasm and resourcefulness and come together in times of need. His work was shot in Birmingham, which is already a very diverse place, but you can see it more in his images. Families and individuals from all round the world, now joining in Birmingham’s allotment, all with the same interest of growing their own produce bringing them closer together as a community. I really liked his work and had it in the back of my mind the whole time I was shooting, so I had something to work with instead of starting from scratch.

Paul Tucker is the other photographer that I found and he focused more on the plots themselves, and the ‘still life’ aspect of an allotment. He wanted to show the life cycle of an allotment, from its dormant state in the winter to its fully-grown colourful state in August time. His project was meant to document this change, and how its guided by the plot holders. I really liked this project too because it gave me ideas on how I could shoot the still life parts of an allotment and involve the plots as well as the plot holders.

To actually go and shoot at Midwinter, I had to get permission from a lady called Fiona that works at the county counsel as the allotment welfare officer. I emailed her, explaining about my project and that I wanted to learn more about this community and get to meet the plot holders. She put me in contact with a plot holder named Terry, who’s plot is the first one when you go through the entrance of Midwinter. I, then, organised actually going to shoot and meet as many of the plot holders as I could.

The first shoot I went on, I didn’t really know where to start with photographing, not knowing what I wanted to focus on the most, or what I wanted to include so I just shot a bit of everything, getting as many strong images as I could to help me with my edit later on. From portraits of the plot holders themselves, the plots and just little things that I saw which made everyone plot so individual and diverse from the next. I had a really good day, meeting many new people and getting to know their community better. What they do and how they do it; how long they’d been there; how they’d gone about setting their plot up etc. Everyone that I met was willing to be photographed, which was really good because it gave me lots of choice about the different plot holders I wanted to include and how individual everyone is but they all come together in this community. Midwinter is a very large plot of land and there is many different allotment plots there, so I didn’t get to meet everyone and quite a few people weren’t there when I went, but after my first shoot I was very confident with the images that I’d shot and felt like I’d learnt so much about these people and their community.

My second shoot, I was a lot more focused on getting portraits of the plot holders and the little things that made each plot individual because I thought this showed the allotment community the best. When I went to my second shoot, as a thank you gesture for letting me photograph them and come into their community, I printed out the images I’d taken of the plot holders and handed them out, everyone was so thankful and put the images up in their sheds which I thought was lovely. The shoot itself went really well, I got the images that I was hoping to achieve and much more.

On my second shoot, I also took a Zoom microphone with me to try and get some audio interviews with the plot holders to play over my video, or at least some ambient sound to play in the background as my images were being displayed, but that didn’t work out as I expected. The audio didn’t come out very clear and I think I was holding the mic too far away from the plot holders when I was talking to them to hear it correctly, so that was the end of that idea. 

After both my shoots, I’d got an edit of about 20 images from each, and it was getting that down to just 20 overall and then down to 10 to print professionally that was my next big problem. To do this, I decided that printing out all the images I wanted to use and laying them out all together on a table would let me see the bigger picture and also work out which images worked well in the series and which didn’t. There were a few images I knew I was going to be using in my series right from the start, because I love the composition, the characters in them or just because I thought they fitted the community brief really well. This gave me some sort of guideline of what my series might end up like, I wanted to include about 10 images of the plot holders, whether that was the portrait I took or of them talking and then about 10 images of the still life aspects of the allotments, whether that be the plots themselves or the way that they had been made individual to everyone.

I made a final edit with the help of my course mates, and I think because I had so many people giving me so many different inputs on what they liked that my opinion on my edit was swayed to something that I felt wasn’t the strongest representation of the work I’d produced. I knew it was going to be hard to make my edit because I had so many strong images that I wanted to include, but I had to take a step back from what everyone else thought and chose what I thought was my best work.

After a meeting with my tutor, I re-evaluated my edit and came out with, what I felt was my strongest work and told the best story about the allotments. We also discussed which images I wanted to print professionally as a representation of my project, and chose what I felt was the strongest of all my images to be printed. I was really happy with my second edit and felt that it was much better than my first, it made more sense, it ran together smoothly and it followed the same narrative the whole time, instead of just having 10 images of the plot holders and then 10 still life images. 

The final step of the module was to create a slideshow of my 20 images, for which I used Adobe Premier Pro because it was the easiest way, I felt, to alter the time the image is displayed for and to add the transitions in between each image. Making the actual slideshow was so simple, it was just about dragging and dropping the images onto the slideshow and changing the time they were displayed for (4 seconds in my case). The hard bit was adding the captions to the images with plot holders, and adding the transitions so that one image dissolved into the next. I tried to do the same with the captions so that it didn’t look like they’d just been added on for the sake of it, and I think it worked out quite well, considering I’ve got no previous Premier experience. Lastly, I exported my video as an MP4 file and I was ready to go.

In conclusion, after starting this module with no idea on what to do or how to go about it, and really struggling for a long time, I’ve come out the other side with some fantastic images, new connections and what I feel is a really strong project that I’m very proud of. Midwinter allotments are a lovely place, full of lovely, friendly and hardworking people. I really enjoyed this project once I’d got into it and knew what I was doing, with my first shoot going so well and giving me so many good images to work with and to lead into my second shoot with much more understand of what I wanted to shoot and how I wanted my project to look. I feel like it went really well, the only thing I was that I’d tried harder to do was the audio for my video, but I think I’ve got such strong images that tell the story so well anyway that it didn’t really matter by the end of it. Concluding, I really enjoyed this project, am really proud of how it turned out and the connections that I’ve made for the future too.