This post is focused on a description of my decisions and process throughout the “Home” project.
For the Images, please look at the Home – Images Post.

Being from the Isle of Man, my initial thought towards this project was its possible difficulty to me. I had to carefully think about what here reminded me or made me think of home.
My University room is designed more or less like a hotel and is filled with items I have mainly just bought for university, so there is very little about it that reminds me of home except for the odd item I have brought with me. I believed though that the idea of photographing items brought from home would be a relatively popular choice for this project, so decided to stay away from it.

The Isle of Man itself is a very rural country, with strong links to its own tradition. It is mainly composed of villages and small towns, with only one city, which is named so due to the technicality of it having a cathedral. As I live on the outskirts of a village and am used to the tranquillity  of  being surrounded by fields, city life is completely new to me. This means that there is also very little available to remind me of my original local area.
I knew that Lincoln did have rural areas available though. So with this in mind, my first idea was to do landscape photography in these rural areas that looked reminiscent of the Island.
I had taken several landscape/ rural centred images on the island before university myself, such as the following:

However, I didn’t feel like these could be recreated and that it wouldn’t be strictly beneficial for me to have referenced my own work as influence. So I found a local photographer from the Island that has a relatively strong focus on landscape photography, Tony Lloyd-Davies.
I tried recreating images such as these, with the first image being Tony’s and the second being my own taken in Lincoln:

Sunset:

Foliage:

Harbour/ Brayford:

I realised that this idea was more or less re-imagining or re-creating Tony’s images however, instead of recreating images that reminded me of home.  As well this, I felt that I would run out of sources for rural places reminding me of home around Lincoln, or at least ones that shared somewhat of a resemblance to the Island.

Next I decided on the idea of taking photographs of distinct homes around Lincoln such as the one below:

I felt like this idea could have some real substance and no lack of sources for images around the city. I did go on to take a few more simply from roaming around the city and stumbling across bizarre looking houses. Unfortunately, I fell out of touch with this idea once I was at my computer and reviewing the photographs. I felt that they were pretty simplistic in nature, had no real connection to myself personally and that they simply seemed like more artistic versions of possible real estate agent images. I thought about imaging old traditional buildings instead and seeing where that could go, however I knew that buildings such as these are quite generic across the UK, making them something that could remind a large amount of other students at the university think of their own home, thus striking the originality I wanted to convey in the project away from me.

Whilst walking around looking for houses, I did notice something that actually made me reminisce quite strongly of my home country. It was simply a quiet, small one-way road. I found it amazing that something I wouldn’t have given a second thought towards, until I began walking around with the idea of home floating around my head, could suddenly click to inspire a connection for me. I decided to take the idea of walking around the city looking for houses and replace the houses with quaint  little roads.
I believe these roads hold such strong ideas of home for me for several reasons. The first being that the Isle of Man simply does have a large amount of, what would be, one-way roads darted around it for its residents to utilise and explore. I have travelled along these roads many times whilst on bike rides, something that I hold fond memories for when thinking of home. The second would be just down to the size of the roads themselves. Now that I have moved from a tiny Island to a place that could be considered to be the same difference as the UK to America in terms of size and westernisation, I see everything as big. Simply finding these roads in what seems like a metropolis to me, really helps to create the illusion that home is closer  than it really is. The aesthetic of the roads themselves makes me recollect home. Although the cobbled stone road isn’t something I would connect with the small rural passageways I was thinking of, it does connect to the smaller roads in the towns around the Island.

To research for this idea I wanted to take a look at some street photography/ photographers. I knew that their ideas on composition and lighting, since they would most likely be dealing with natural light, could come in handy when I went out photographing these roads.

After a simple search of street photography, I realised it was a common trend for the images to be Black & White. This was something that I didn’t want. I felt that by doing this I would be taking away the organic feel of the images and would be making them feel in some way industrial or urbanised. This would be the complete opposite feeling I would want to be coming across from the images as I felt this style would disconnect me from the idea of my strongly rural home.
Due to the trend in the Black & White  use, it meant that research took quite some time before I eventually found a photographer who had a style that seemed somewhat representative of what I would want to achieve in my own images.

After a good amount of research, I did find a photographer I felt could help inspire me. Frederick Ardley is a British landscape photographer who focuses on creating dramatic scenes in his images and is often captivated to document architectural anomalies in urban areas. It is mainly these images, set within the more traditional towns and cities of the UK that I was interested in examining.

http://blog.freddieardley.com/

Images such as these stood out to me on his website and blog. I liked the composition and use of the British overcast weather in influencing the images’ drama and lighting.
However,  the roads themselves, although they do play a role in helping to stylize the photo, I  felt were still secondary to the houses and architecture surrounding them. I wanted this to be the opposite within my own images and for the roads to be the clear focus of the image. Or, if it didn’t appear so at first, when viewed in companionship with the other images within the project, it would become obvious that the cornerstone of the photographs were the roads themselves.

This image had more or less the composition that I wanted to be represented within my own, with the road being the primary focus. I do feel though, that the desaturation in these images was too strong for my own. Although providing a dramatic effect, through giving them a low saturation, much like Black & White, it provides the image with a stronger structure, but it overall feels overly dramatic for what I wanted to achieve. That being said, I did lower the saturation to a limited extent in my later images in the project for reasons I explained in the description.

These two images are more or less the style and surrounding I imagine when thinking of a small one-lane road. I knew I would not be able to find roads like this in Lincoln without a clear understanding of the area so stuck to smaller roads within the city itself. I did notice something about these images though that I believed gave the roads themselves slightly more impact in these pictures. The use of a slight dampness on the roads gave them this luminosity that wouldn’t be seen if they were simply dry tarmac. I felt like this would be great to use in my images so decided to take them on a day shortly after or whilst it was lightly raining.