Statement of Intent

The last three years have been difficult but with the help of my friends, family and staff I am now coming to the end which I cannot believe. The last year more so than ever has been mentally stressful because I have had the added stress of our dissertation but more so my life after University. My whole life I have been in education. Always come September there has been another year of education to great me. So I have been practically worrying about what I want to do. I do know that I do know that as much as I love it I do not want to be a swimming teacher for the rest of my life.

One major worry for me is my health. Having fibromyalgia and my other conditions has made life these past few years difficult and I have been worried what that would mean for my future. After having attended numerous Your Future Plan seminars during lockdown I realised that photography might not be my most successful career path because of my health. It would be helpful to have a steady source of income alongside my photography, so I decided that I would do what I love, which is helping children just not in a pool environment. So I decided to start applying for primary school teaching assisting jobs, this would give me the chance to freelance on week nights, weekends and holidays.

My true love in photography though is my documentary photography which I know is what I want to continue with. Most likely my final major project but this module will also set me up for freelancing outside of ongoing long standing projects.

Final Evaluation 

Overall, I am really happy with how my website has turned out and how far it and myself have come in the past few months. I feel as though I have learnt lots about website management, keeping up appearance on all socials that I am active on and selling my brand. 

Post-graduation I will continue to keep all of my active socials updated and my website updated with my best work and not to overload it. I will continue to find myself work and to advertise myself in hopes of work finding me also through word of mouth too.

I have decided that due to my ongoing long term health conditions, employment may not be smooth sailing as I am reasonably limited as to what I can do regarding what causes pain. I have decided to take my love for teaching but take it out of the pool hall and into the classroom. I enjoy working with children but due to my health I can't work the hours that my current job entails. I have decided to become a primary school teaching assistant rather than a teacher. I have chosen this route because a teaching assistant doesn't have work to mark or lesson plans to write leaving myself time to freelance and keep up with personal work on weeknights, weekends and holidays, allowing myself to keep my foot in the industry, to follow both of my passions and to bring in extra income alongside a steady income. Having time to continue with personal work (documentary) will allow me to expand on my FMP and commission commercial work. I will continue to freelance job hunt on platforms such as CV Library, Indeed and Total Jobs alongside keeping my CV up to date and promoting myself.

I have decided that I see myself foremostly as a documentary photographer but with interests in 35mm, black & white, commercial, documentary, mini street and landscapes, portrait and self-portraiture, travel and videography. I plan on entering as many upcoming competitions/festivals such as the AOP Awards and Photo North as I can to keep myself engaged, to gain more experience and to hopefully gain accommodation. 

I have never found Adobe particularly user friendly and have always struggled using the software. However, I’ve found that especially for slight changes that Adobe Bridge’s Camera RAW works very well for me and its user friendly. For the images shot for this particular body of work only only lighting changes, crops and spot healing/clone stamping were needed. This was really handy and it helped for fast edits, editing down huge files. 

I think from the start to end of this module I have come a long way and learnt lots about my abilities and what I am capable of. I feel as though I have developed my photographic and website/professional knowledge greatly and I have achieved more knowledge of what it means to be a photographer behind the scenes and the sense of achievement of creating a website. These past four/five months I have had to overcome lots of health problems and they have greatly impacted my university work unfortunately but I feel as though I have managed to keep up to date this past two months reasonably well. I've also learn't from my experience shooting the sculpture show that a back up even though not always needed should always be there ready to go just in case.