Hopes & Fears

Week 1 ImagesMy past has been rather varied I have done many different things, I took my A levels but decided I wasn’t quite ready to go to university I felt I didn’t have the confidence or the grades to be accepted onto any reputable course that id want to get involved with, so I took a course in Media production at Kirklees College. After that I was actually persuaded about the idea of university by my friends and college tutors, they helped me realize that university would broaden my mind and not only that but help me find a place for my skills where I could improve and work on them. I feel my interest in photography developed throughout college more than at A level because during the media production course I had a lot more freedom and guidance if I needed it from tutors. I feel that showing people my work and discussing it helps me improve my own work and change things I wouldn’t of necessarily noticed when first looking at photographs I’ve taken. I chose Leeds Met because they had the right course and I defiantly wanted to stay close to home as all my friends and family are here. I always felt that one of the biggest fears of mine would be losing the closeness I had with my family. Before starting university I sadly lost a member of my close family, so starting university gave me mixed emotions because of my loss and because of all the changes that had being happening in my life.

I’ve also had a fear of acceptance from peers and from people around me, I worried about working in groups and how other peoples organizational skills would compare to what I expected from working in teams. However I’ve overcome this fear by making good friends and learning to rely on other peoples abilities as well as using my own to help group situations as well as challenging myself in my surroundings by pushing myself with my work. Deciding to go to university itself I was very fearful about getting a place because no one in my family has really gone before and they couldn’t help me or give me any advice as to what it would be like and what courses are available. I worked hard to get my place at university and I struggled sorting out all my finances and paperwork to be able to start in September. I hope that in the future I’ll be able to make a good enough income that I can help my family and show them that an education can help you get further in life than not going onto higher education.

Week 2 Images

I do want to improve my skills and be able to pass on some of the knowledge I have learnt so I would like to in some form be able to in my future give back to others from my own experiences and help them learn skills to do with photography. I took a night course and that helped me gain a lot of confidence in my own work because showcasing the work in front of others gave me a huge boost. So I hope that our final years exhibi-tion and other exhibits we have throughout all of the course I will be able to present work in different unique ways and put across vivid images that will grab peoples attention and make them notice my work as well as being able to talk about my work and not feel as though I don’t know what I’m talking about. I would really enjoy showing people my work if I knew they defiantly wouldn’t ask hard questions sometimes I cant answer. In the past I haven’t enjoyed pitching my work incase some of my ideas aren’t put across as I envisage them in my own mind. Another thing that worries me about pitching is not only presenting myself in a professional manner but if I’m dressed appropriately for the situation and if the speech I’ve prepared comes across properly to the people I’m pitching too.

Starting university has being challenging because I don’t want to let down my parents who haven’t been to university and at the same time I don’t want to let myself down either as I worked hard to get a place here and I should still continue I feel to earn my place in each of the following years after the first. I have found the change difficult and one of the fears I first thought about when starting university was making friends with new people, which as of now still I’m struggling with, I am fairly quiet person and I don’t live on campus so I have found it hard relating to some of the peoples conversations but I am pushing myself to talk to different people. Because I haven’t moved away from home I do feel better because I know the area around where the campus is, but at the same time I don’t like not really knowing anyone. I hope that after the first few weeks in the first year I’ll know enough tutors and people of my course to feel comfortable in my surroundings and start to be able to come out of myself and feel more like I’m part of the group. I also think I’ll be more recep-tive during lectures and feel more at ease asking and answering questions when I’ve settled in a bit more.

Week 2 ImagesDuring the first week of university I had a lot of ideas for future projects that I cant wait to get stuck into. I’m looking forward to starting work and getting to use my new camera which I bought just before the course started. I was worried that I wouldn’t fit in with everyone else but the group is very diverse and I feel that in time I will fit in and feel more like I can be myself around everyone. I have been quiet which I shouldn’t of being but the fear of looking socially inadequate has made me go back a bit more into myself than I possibly should have done.

I hope to get out of the foundation project the sense that I have understood the brief and that I know what I’m doing. Although id like to be able to push some of the boundaries and will do some experimentation in my research with the different types of photograph we have being set to take. I’m very organized so my main hope is that my organizational skills will shine through my work and my research and show everyone that as well as photography my other skills that I can put towards jour-nalism can be as vital. Although we have to work in pairs I would like to improve on my own skills and knowledge and work on my Photoshop skills for the future as I have edited photos before and would like to improve and gain a better knowledge of enhancing photographs.

I hope to get the most out of my time at university I want to gain some new friends and contacts as well as broad-ening my knowledge of software packages and camera equipment. I want to make sure I keep up to a good standard of work and I will do this by keeping myself strictly organized and have everything in its place for when I need to use it. I also feel that keeping up to date with my work will make sure I have time to take better photographs and hopefully play around more with camera settings and editing software. I’m hoping that during the course I will develop a better portfolio as I have a basic portfolio at the moment which I gathered throughout work I did in my own time and during college before I started university. I would like to have hard copies of all my photographs and to see my work in photo books as well. I have also high hopes for the blogging of work, I’ve never blogged but I have uploaded work and got feedback from a website called Deviant Art so I hope my blog will help me get even more exposure and help get different people to see my work outside of an establishment context.

Week 3 ImagesA fear of university also was the kit, I didn’t want to let people think I wasn’t a complete professional and would ask stupid questions in front of other people. So I have worried that if I ask something and someone else knows I will be ridiculed for not knowing everything because others may already know it. I did feel quite inadequate when everyone said they’d used film cameras and although I’ve never used one I do own an SLR film camera, so hopefully during the years of the course I will learn how to use the camera properly, because I have tried before but haven’t quite mastered the manual settings of the camera. For my future I have so many career ideas and things I want to do it’s a lot to think about, I suppose I would love to work for either a magazine or newspaper ideally because that’s the type of photography that I feel would be the most stable for a full time job however I would also like to take wedding photographs and portraits, I love the idea of being able to see everyone on their special day and making their wedding photographs personal but not just that unique as well.

The most out there things I would love to work in would be photography for the National Geographic I’ve never being traveling so traveling around different places seeing so many different countries, animals, peoples and amazing landscapes and places would be a dream of mine. Just to get one photo published by a magazine like that would be a huge confidence boost. I also like the idea of working In fashion photography I know it would take a lot to do something in this subject area but from catalogues to the catwalk there is such a diverse coverage of fashion I find it interesting all the different subjects you’d come into contact with and the fact some of the makeup used on the models are really fascinating seeing close up in magazines.

In the future the one fear I have is finishing university and then not being able to find a job in the subject area I’ve been studying. Because of the job climate at the moment I do hope that it will pick up and when I leave university there will be enough photographic jobs for me to be able to find work somewhere. I would like to at first get into either wedding photography or work freelance for people, however ideally working for a company would make me feel more stable as I don’t want to be out of work not being able to find an income. Another fear would be letting down my family when I’ve finished the course by either failing and not getting the grades they’d assume I could achieve or failing the course entirely and being told I couldn’t retake the year.

I think although I have had a lot of fears about university I seem to always overcome the fears I have, so even though now I have fears about my future I’m sure in the end I will work things out and be able to achieve the things I want to do. Because if I work hard enough the work will pay off eventually it might not necessarily happen straight after I’ve finished university but if I at least try my hardest on the course throughout all the years, then I can expect the best outcome from all my work. After university I’m hoping that I could possibly travel or maybe work somewhere abroad for the first year afterwards to get a feel of another culture and also to make contacts in different countries and to be able to see new places as well as broadening my mind.

Mary Baillie

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