Reflective Blog
Early
developments
Early
plans for this project for this project will be to try and get to a wide range
of different games to take my photographs from 5-a-side to 11-a-side games. As
this project will focus on grass roots football and the UEFA description of
grass roots football is any type of football that is not professional I will be
planning to go to a variety of games. Some of the work that I will be doing early on in this project is working with cerebral palsy events I have done
shoots and St. George's Park and in Nottingham which will also be used in my
final products. There will be a wide variety in the cerebral palsy events alone
with the event at St. George's Park being a junior level event with the players
all under the age of 10, whereas the event in Nottingham the players will be
played at a higher level, these will be part of the cerebral palsy world games
and the players will be at the international level.
The cerebral
palsy events went very well and I managed to capture a range of strong images
that I am really proud of. I was fortunate when going to the World Games in
Nottingham that they were on the final day of games so I managed to capture the
3rd and 5th placed games which did include the England and Scotland teams,
unfortunately I was unable to shoot the final which I would have liked to do.
Even with the two games that I did shoot I managed to get a fair few images I
am thrilled with. The cerebral palsy event at St. George’s Park was different
to what I expected as it featured a wide variety of age ranges but I focused on
the junior level as this is exactly what I was originally planning to do. After the
success of the cerebral palsy events I will try to find out if there are any
other cerebral palsy events going on in the next few weeks and I will also find
out if there are any further events at St. George’s Park, as well to make sure
that I can get several more images to add to the collection that I have already
managed to get from the previous event at St. George’s Park and the event in
Nottingham.
Plans for the next few weeks
Over the next few weeks I have at least one event at St. George's Park a Team 19 event which will be men and women's 5-a-side tournaments which will be run over one day. My main plan for this will be to try and focus on the women's football as it is something I have very little experience in. Though most of my first football photography was women's football I have focused on men's football for a long time so I feel it is time to get back to it so I can get some better images for this project and I can use for my products. I also want to improve my photography for my portfolio as well, as the original women's football images I took about four or five years ago were in my opinion quite average. Not only will this shoot help my portfolio but it will also add a strong collection of images to my collection and this will help with my final products and they will have a variety of impressive images.
Production
After taking the wide range of images, that I couldn't add to due to my planned shoots all falling through, I decided that I would begin researching the best places to get my books created. After doing a bit of research which entailed me looking at a few different websites to try and find the best quality book and for the best possible prices. This is where the problems for this next stage arose as I had already decided a rough price of £8 to sell my products for, all of the top quality websites that I found were charging around £15 to get the books produced and I realised that by using these sites I would get not much more than half of my money back on selling the products. I arrived at a price of £8 through research into photographic books and seeing that £8 was a rough average of the books already available as they ranged from £6 to £10. I did discover through research that some books are sold for as much as £25 but these are the more high quality books and probably would have cost me about £25 to produce and I could have risked a loss on my investment had none of the books sold when I went to sell them. I decided to produce the books for £15 instead as I thought that should I not sell any books at all I would take as big a loss as I would have had if I had decided to produce a higher quality book with I would have ultimately charged more for and broken even had I sold them all. I feel that regardless of which choice I would have made I was going to be taking a huge risk and potentially a huge loss as well.
Selling
I decided that when it came to selling my products I would try and find the best possible place to sell them. I began by asking people would they be interested in buying a photographic football book and unfortunately most of them had little interest in buying this sort of product. I then decided to go to a local sale and try and see if I could sell my books which again didn't work out. Looking back at this I feel that I should have tried changing my books up a bit so that they weren't entirely focused on the photographic side of grass roots football, I feel that I should have added some in depth information about the photographs. I also feel that I should have done more research into where I could have sold my books so that I could actually make some sales and at least make back some of the money that I lost on the production costs of the books. After looking into further books I would know exactly what I would not only add to improve but also change to the products to make then better and hopefully sell more.
Brief Final Reflection
When I look back at this project as a whole I would say that at times I struggled but I manage to create a product to sell and even though it didn't I felt that book as a whole was good. I know exactly what went wrong and how to improve and hopefully this would have got some sales for the books. I have a more in depth final reflection submitted in another document.
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