Exercise: A Narrative Picture Essay

For this exercise, i had to tell a story using photographs. I decided to use the method of baking a cake as my story.

I love to bake and so this was very familiar to me and so i could focus more on taking the photographs than the process of baking a cake itself. I am familiar with a lot of cook books, and how pictures are represented in these. I was already aware of what i personally find visually attractive in a cook book and had a basic idea of how i would set one out if creating one myself.

To tell my story, i took a photograph of each step i took creating a cake, starting with the ingredients and ending with the finished product. Some photographs i took out as i felt they were not important or visually just didn't look that great. I wanted the steps to be obvious, but i didn't want too many pictures so it was overwhelming. I wanted some simple, crisp, easy to understand and quite modern looking.

I kept my photographs in chronological order, to show method and to be easily understandable to the reader, so much so that very little text would be necessary to understand how to make the cake.

To get it looking very neat and simple, i tried to keep my photographs together in  neat, very clear square formation. I tried to keep all the photographs the same size, as no step is more important than the other, and to be the simplicity of this visually pleasing. I made the one photograph, of the egg shells, bigger than the rest. I did this just to break it up a bit, and to me it makes it look just that bit better. I chose this photograph over the others, as i found it more attractive, and more abstract. I feel it works well. It also breaks up the colour in what would other wise be a collection of very beige photographs. 

My vision for this in print would be; these photographs on one page, and on the adjacent page, the recipe. Very simple, very neat, very crisp, very easy to understand and hopefully very visually pleasing.

From left to right
1. Ingredients
2. Creaming the butter
3. Creamed butter mixed with sugar
4. Empty egg shells
5. Cake batter
6. Batter ready for the oven
7. Whipping cream for the filling
8. The finished product.