12 Days Of Christmas

Over the Christmas holidays we were set a project which was to tell a story of our christmas using 12 images or 12 fifteen second "instagram style" videos. The idea of using 12 different images that represented our Christmas came from the song "12 days of Christmas", I knew that most people would take an obvious approach to this title and invent different ways of recreating each day of the song through imagery, but I thought that doing something like this will come across as too contrived and obvious. I decided it would be a good idea to carry my camera around with me over the Christmas period and just capture things i found interesting. So this is what i did, and on day one i came across a house covered from top to bottom in christmas lights, the lights were extremely cheesy, contrived and  tacky. Although I initially set out to photograph non-cheesy elements of Christmas, I discovered that the fun and fantasy of Christmas  lies in the  bright lights  that celebrate it.

After discovering the brilliance of tacky christmas lights I decided to give my project a point of direction so that it wouldn't wander off pointlessly. I then started looking closely at lighting around this time of year, recognising that everything was lit up brightly and beautifully, whether it be tacky or not. The images grouped together above  show different aspects of lighting that coincide with the theme of Christmas; winters sun, fairy lights, candles, shop displays etc… I tried to vary up the way in which I captured the lighting e.g. shadows, blurred light, close ups etc.. I did this so that each image was completely different from the last, I thought this was an important concept to keep throughout my work, so that each image represented something completely different, capturing my Christmas  experience as realistically as possible .