Witley Court

Back at the start of June we were taken to Court in Worcester to photograph the ruined stately home and the beautiful gardens surrounding it. Earlier that day we had been given a brief to follow so we knew what type of photographs to take even if that meant drifting away from the style we were used to.

The client, English Heritage, wanted some new advertising material and the brief stated that the images needed to appeal to 20-30 year olds. After a little bit of brainstorming I had come up with a few ideas as to how I would capture this place to entice a younger audience.

One of the ideas I had was to shoot through my iPhone camera. The majority of 20-30 year olds use a camera phone and share their images on social media, so I wanted to try and show that in my photos. I don't really think this worked too well as the difference in brightness between my iPhone screen and the background was just too much which meant I had to quite considerably overexpose my images to make my phone screen visible.

Another idea I had was to shoot instant photos on my Instax camera and hold those in front of what I had just taken a photo of. Although this worked quite well in practice I don't feel as though those images look that professional, as my nail varnish is quite chipped. I do however like this style and would definitely do something similar in the future.

As I wasn't sure I really hit the brief with the photographs alone I now needed to try and think of a way to do so with my editing. One style of photography I'm becoming more interested in is fashion and editorial style photography; I read a lot of fashion magazines and I've started to pick up inspiration from them. Although these photographs have nothing to do with fashion I thought I could apply some fashion inspired editing to them. 

One thing I see a lot in fashion photography is borders. I thought I could add some strong borders to my images to give them a 'young' feel. First I added a simple white border and although I did really like the outcome I still felt that the image looked too traditional. 

I did like the 'postcard' effect that the white border gave my image, however I needed to add a border that would make the image appeal to a young audience. I came up with the idea of repeating my image several times, meaning the border would just be that same image but slightly bigger. 

Overall I am very happy with my final images and I do feel that I have completed the client's brief. Although I haven't ended up with as many final images as I would have liked, the 8 I do have are of a good standard.

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