Retrospectively, this may have been the first shoot I’ve ever done where I had an idea for what I wanted going into it. Not necessarily a one-to-one, but a general understanding for how I wanted my composition to look. I also actually hated this assessment.

To elaborate, I am not against pre-planning of any sort. Bringing cool lights you think may be helpful, different lenses, backgrounds, whatever it may be, can be a great way to spice up a shoot if you see something that strikes your inspiration. However, I cannot emphasise how consistently irritated I was that trying to replicate something took all the magic out of seeing the world through the lens of a camera. Of my five photos for this assignment, I’m arguably happy with two.

Let me work backwards here. I knew that my edits were going to need a lot of colour manipulation, as the neon style of Arnaud Moro contains a lot of contrasting neons. As a result, I knew I wanted to select photos from him that had relatively simple lighting structures where I would be able to try and recapture it with less roadblocks.

And, truthfully, that was probably a good call. There were a variety of reasons I couldn’t do some of his works (some are on film and re-shot on to create an effect, I don’t own a lighting company, the turnaround for this assessment was more or less a week and on the weekend I had an important event on, to name a few), but for the most part, I think the spirit of them was similar. I also remembered a previous student example in class we were shown was manipulated digitally to achieve the same effect on film, to mixed success, and felt I could probably also do something similar.

Now, the reason I hated the assessment:

I think a large portion of these photos are taken ‘in the moment’ (the decisive moment, if you will). Even the ones Moro takes that are two layers of film, he still takes the first set of film on a whim, with enough time to be able to consider what would look good as a canvas for them. This pre-planning aspect may have been fine if I had a whole month to hire everything I could ever need with all the space in the world to recreate it, but between a short turnaround, lack of resources and, above all, a creation that I was trying to just attempt to be like, rather than my own, caused several aspects to not come out as I hoped. In future, I am definitely going to use this type of prompt as inspiration, more than mimicry, as I definitely feel it took the magic out of both the process, and my photos.

However, one thing that was noteworthy was I found my editing process to be fairly effective. The edits themselves are so-so, and probably gave myself a difficult task with the photos I chose to be able to turn them into photos similar to the original, but I definitely felt efficient (which is not something I’ve always been able to say during my media career). I’d also say, when I started taking a little more creative liberty rather than sticking to a close original, I definitely felt my edits start to become better. Slide 4 on my PowerPoint was probably the biggest deviation, where I changed the colour tone entirely due to many conflicting blue hues in my image, and I think it came out much better as a result (though I’m still not entirely pleased with it, as the aesthetic of Moro’s image is totally evaporated even though the composition is incredibly similar).

Overall though, I think I just found that my biggest inspiration is going out into the world and trying to demonstrate my view for photography is through my interactions with the world more than it is pre-planned. I definitely feel limited or constricted when trying to find something as opposed to discovering it. However, it also probably demonstrated my pre-planning skills in pre-production are probably my weak link, and sometimes that shows up in the post-production in the form of the edit, where I have to use images I perhaps wouldn’t have needed to if I tried to consider how best to approach it as much as just what I needed from it. Prior to now, that hasn’t really come back to bite me, but if I find myself wanting to capture something in advance later and I only get one attempt, I should probably get better at it.