Assignment 5: Selection

I have been looking at my 44 edited house photos over the last week that I had proofs printed of. I am happy with the colours and generally with the crops, though a couple I think I have cropped in a little too tight and might loosen them up a bit. That is a fairly minor issue though. I now have to choose 12 or less for submission for Assignment 5. I laid the prints all out on the table:

Dining table covered in images

I then made arrangements of the photos, one version shown above, considering different groupings. I found it interesting to move them about, lay them next to others and see how the various 'groups' of images fitted together.

I have fitted them loosely into groups, and then spent some time just moving photos around on the table to see what ideas I came up with. I had groups based on form (i.e. triangular), style (of house for example), present of vegetation (large trees/smaller trees) and just plain aesthetics (which my original selection was primarily based on). It was very beneficial to have the images all out on the table and be able to move them around and see what worked well with what.

I have come up with two groups that I quite like at the moment, based first on asthetics (though I'm a little sure of why?). These are my favourite 9 images:

Aesthetic images

And my preferred group, which I have tentatively labelled 'hide' - to use the bird-watching analogy - of the house being somewhere we literally hide from the outside world, in a variety of ways - for example, the house being set back on the block/ trees blocking the view/ windows shaded or hidden in some way/ hedge. I think this works well with my thinking about why I started this project in the first place, my personal investigations into house presentation and what it might say about me.

Hide

In the grouping displayed above I have carefully selected the order - starting with the similar shapes first - rectangular hedges and building on the top row. Then the second is those houses almost totally hidden by trees. The third row shows houses hidden more subtly - by being set back or high fences or raised up to isolate from the street.

I note in the course notes we are to submit 10 to 12 images, but I feel like the 9 I have selected above 'fit' structurally very well together and the addition of 3 more images would destroy the balance. I hope this would not cause a problem...

I need to address a few minor issues that I have noticed in the printing process - I have cropped in a little too close on a couple of images, so want to loosen this up a bit. I will look at my prints in more detail (hopefully in the daylight if I get a chance!) before finalising them for print and submission.

It's interesting to note how different my selection is from the initial choices I made, and this reaffirms how important it is to keep an open mind about what makes a good image - I may have not chosen to process some of these images, and yet they form a coherent interesting group (in my opinion anyway!).