Art and Design (Photography)

Course summary

Photography jobs are as vast as the medium is visible in the world. This course will make you a great creative thinker, able to construct your photographic images so they contain high visual appeal and visual communication. In this way you will be able to carve out your desired career in photography. The course is directed by AQA with assessment criteria making this course as much about project management as it is about photography, giving you the skills and academic requirement to enable you to build projects of your own. This will mean that you will be able to apply this knowledge to any other subject or profession where project management features. Photography is an exciting medium that can be used in many different ways. Careers in photography include: art careers, advertising, commercial work, editorial, fashion, film, food, forensic, industrial, architectural, aerial, portraiture and wedding photography, sports and travel and more. Photographs are visible everywhere because we love the photographic representation of our world and ourselves and therefore there is a huge market for photographic work. Magazines and newspapers show advertising and editorial photographic work. Billboards and hoardings show mainly fashion and advertising photography. In the film industry, the ‘Director of Photography’ may operate lighting or camera and they have control over the aesthetic or ‘look of the film’. Photographers are employed to take ‘Stills’ in films and also photographic documentation for ‘Continuity’. Artists use photography in vast ways to show conceptual thinking, and these photographs are found in galleries, books, magazines and on the internet. Photographs can be used on the web or as beautiful printed objects. GCSE and A Level Photography will teach you to look at the world creatively. The creative potential stimulated in this course will enable you to apply creative, analytical and critical thinking and problem solving, in order to visually communicate ideas through photography. This awareness can also be employed to any other course that you do. Students will develop critical analyses of artists’ work; helping to develop their own ideas through reaction, practical application and written reflections. Throughout these courses, students will learn about a variety of photographic media, techniques and processes including hands-on experimentation with traditional techniques in our dedicated darkrooms, lighting in our studio and computers for Photoshop and digital media, utilising these techniques and equipment; to achieve visual communication through photography.