Unit 04 - The Final Evaluation

Updated 18/12/21

Keep in mind your final evaluation makes up 1/4 of your whole grade.

Generally, students will address the criteria for all of the other parts of the work quite well, but then let themselves down by producing weak evaluation work.

You would have been instructed to produce weekly evaluations looking back at your weeks work explaining...

(1). How your use of Materials, techniques and processes has met the requirements of the brief.

(2). How your exploration into Materials, techniques and processes has developed your own Photographic (Art and design) practice.

(3). What you could, or need to do to improve your Photographic skills

Give yourself a whole day to do or do it over a series of days as you approach the final deadline...

Make sure you cover the top 2 sections first. The more in-depth the response is, the more likely you'll produce the work at a higher grade. Once you know that you've covered 4/DP7 and 4/DP8, then look at what's required to get the work up to merit and distinction level. 

Then go on to explain where you have used your techniques and processes in conjunction with your composite work in detail along with page numbers of where the work is evidenced.

The more you do and the better the detail, the higher the grade. 

4/D.P8 - Skills development. A list of skills that you might need to improve. You just need to use some of these and explain what you would do to improve these. Aim to write a paragraph on each one you choose suggesting how these improvements could be made.

• Basic camera handling knowing how to use your camera in Manual mode.
• White balance, knowing when to use it and how you use it.
• Bracketing - how to do it, when to use it and why.
• Exposure - knowing how to take accurate light readings and make judgments on what constitutes a mid-tone.
• How to use a Flash meter correctly in the studio and with ambient light.
• Using studio flash - how to achieve the affect you need - where to position the lights to evoke mood, or highlight texture, shape and form or reduce it.
• How to use your lens focal lengths and knowing when their use is appropriate.
• Using your aperture to control depth of field.
• Using shutter speeds to either freeze the action or allow blur creatively.
• Understanding light, knowing the difference between point and diffuse light and how to use it appropriately in your images.
• Film processing
• Choosing the appropriate film for the situation your shooting.
• Using enlargers.
• Printing images in the darkroom - dodging, burning in and pre-fogging.
• Cropping images using easels.
• Using materials to enhance/reinforce the narrative
• Using techniques to enhance/reinforce the narrative
• Using appropriate processes to enhance/reinforce the narrative

TOP TIP

(1). Use the intro that you wrote at the start of this Unit where you explained what the requirements of the brief were. Copy that explanation into the final evaluation as your starting point.

(2). Takes this seriously - go back over your weekly evaluations, read them and copy some of the points you made from them into your final evaluation. If you use the prompts above or from this blog page here don't write them up as bullet points, form them into full sentences and paragraphs.

(3). Once you're done if it's less than a page, make it look more impressive by changing the text size so that your evaluation fills the page.