Sketchbook Requirements

Sketchbook Contents

For the Photography qualification, you are required to submit a sketchbook that records the progression of your ideas throughout the completion of the coursework. It is important that you explore all your ideas thoroughly and document everything as you are going along. To ensure that you are satisfying the requirements of the exam board, use the following to guide to help you.

1.     Complete Personal Investigation.

2.     Then move on to stage two. This is:

·       Produce a mindmap of your chosen theme

·       Look up the word in a dictionary and write down the definition

·       Look up the word in a thesaurus and write down all the suggestion

3.     Choose three ideas from your original mindmap that you will research in more depth.

4.     You then need to write a brief paragraph about why you’ve chosen the ideas you have and how you plan to research them.

5.     For each of the three ideas, you must find 3 or 4 images that you will analyse in detail using the guidance on the blog.

6.     You must then write a review of your research, talking about what you learnt from your analyses, how you will use them in the rest of your work and which of the three ideas you will look at further.

7.     When you’ve chosen the idea you want to look at in greater depth, write a brief outline of the idea you think you might want to do. You then need to find additional photos that explore your planned idea further.

8.     You must then write a list of experimentations you’d like to conduct in order to find out about the sorts of techniques you might use in your final photographic piece.  This could be exploring the effect of different lenses or filters; or how framing impacts on the meaning of an image; shutter speed; Photoshop techniques; video etc.

9.     All the experimentations that you undertake must be recorded visually in your sketchbook with annotations.

10.  You must then write a review of your experimentations, talking about what you learnt from them and how you will use them in your final photographic piece.

11.  Before you start on your final piece, you must produce a brief plan of how you will go about shooting and presenting your work.

12.  Finally, you need to write a review of your finished photographic piece, explaining how your initial research and experimentations have been used in its completion.

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REMEMBER, YOU ARE MARKED ACROSS FOUR ASSESSMENT OBJECTIVES (AO):

AO1 – RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS

AO2 – EXPERIMENTATIONS AND EXPLANATION

AO3 – RECORDING OF IDEAS, OBSERVATIONS, INTENTIONS AND HOW WORK IS PROGRESSING

AO4 – THE FINAL PIECE AND HOW IT’S BEEN INFLUENCED BY THE RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATIONS

STUDENTS WHO DID NOT ACHIEVE THE GRADE THEY WANTED HAD NOT DONE ALL THE WORK REQUIRED TO SATISFY THE ASSESSMENT OBJECTIVES AO1, AO2 AND AO3.