Friday 8 September 2017

Life Hacks - how to research for Photography projects at level 3

It's essential on Level 3 Photography courses such BTEC, UAL, AS, and A-Level to produce good quality research using a range of resources.

I would argue that you need to be very selective about what and who you look at if you're looking to attain the higher grades... Merits and Distinctions.
This guide gives you some tips about how to go about it to secure those good grades.

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Best Practice

Use Photographic Journals such as...

The British Journal of Photography
Hotshoe
Aperture

Why? They're in the LRC and they are the most up to-date information on contemporary and historical photography. The magazines are written by and edited by qualified experts whose opinions, views and critiques of the photography are second to none. The articles are short, concise and to the point, ram-packed with the information you need to produce your research for your projects. 

Flicking through the pages of journals such as these has the potential to bring to your attention a multitude or different photographers and approaches to photography. Journals by far are the most effective way of accessing high quality photography.

2nd best approach

Use books

Pre-fixes. 

One of the most useful for discovering how the images end up being used and what materials they are printed on, how big they are and how much they sell for is to pre-fix the name of the work or Photographer with the phrase...

"Sold at auction"           This usually brings up a range of auction houses or websites where the work is sold and in the descriptions you'll find useful info about the work. The search here was...

Sold at auction The Bechers This brought up a list in Google that resulted in this page here...

Other pre-fixes that are useful are...

Interview with
Equipment used by
Camera used by
Influenced by
Technique
Another really good thing to try is, to look for interviews on Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. The same with written interviews, they can be conducted by anyone, but as long as the photographer responds they usually really useful.
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Bibliography - Quotes - Cross referencing 

It's important that you produce a bibliography, it doesn't have to list all of your sources, all you need to show is that you know how to do it, so in the case of the BTEC assignments a list of 4 or 5 is more than sufficient as it demonstrates this adequately. Ideally, you should use Journals and books primarily with less internet use. 



When you're using quotes make sure you (A) 'Indent' the text for the quote
(B). Use a different a different colour or shade of text and use "speech marks".
(C). Cross reference the text by indicating its source with a number that matches the same number against the bibliography entry (D).
(E). Make sure you include 4-5 entries for your bibliography - if you can, use Journals and books. See here for how you make bibliographical entries for journals and books. 

When you're producing the 1st page of the research other images that can be used are images of the photographer with their camera and images that you recognise as potentially or you know have influenced the work. 

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If you do use the internet for your research be careful of the sites that you choose. Here's the start of a list of good websites that you can trust. These sites are edited, written by experts, academics, critics and people that know what they are writing about. 

If you find really long articles and you're looking for something very specific you can speed up the search by using CTRL + F. So if you're looking for info on the equipment used by the Photographer type CTRL + F and then in the search field type equipment the use the return key and it'll find any reference or use of the word in the article.


https://www.americansuburbx.com/
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/seanohagan
https://www.lensculture.com/
https://www.moma.org/
https://www.saatchigallery.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhNiJaoVow - "This is modern art Matthew Collings. All worth watching and referencing.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/

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TOP TIPS

If you have a theme or subject and you need to find a photographer that works with that theme and shoots picture on that theme, you need to use my list here...

www.listofphotographers.blogspot.com

Once on the blog use the CTRL + F and then type the theme into the field box and use the return key to search for names of photographers that work with that subject/theme.















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