SQA Higher Photography

In a decision that I made what seems like many moons ago, really it was only last year, I started studying at night school for my Higher. The work builds up into a year-long project and an exam. Of course covid-19 stepped in and the exam was cancelled, so I have no idea how that would have worked out. The project, however, is half finished and the photos mostly unshared. I kept the photos quiet while I was working but it’s time to share what I did work on.

So it was called People Make Glasgow…. Oh that sounds familiar, you say? Yes, I’ll admit it was a shameless theft of the toursim catchphrase. It did give rise to an interesting set of images as I went out to find “people”. I didn’t manage to get the final set of images so I’ll share some for my favourites from the shoots I did manage to complete. The whole project was about 2 shoots short of a full set.

2 of the shoots were attempts at street photography. The city centre at night – Halloween night to be exact, and Pollok Park and SEC craft fair. I got quite into these shoots.

The next shoot was a marathon of a single day. Riverside Museum in the morning and the Style Mile Christmas Carnival in the afternoon. This yielded a lot of images and a fair few that would probably have made it into the final line up. It was brilliant trying to catch images as the parade went past in manual mode, that was a challenge.

Over the month of December I centred on the Christmas markets in George Square. It was a challenge to get images handheld in the darkness.

My mojo kinda left me after Christmas for a bit and the next thing the world had changed from under us. I took my camera with me to work at an office in the city centre for the final week before the lockdown started. Then it was empty streets and lines outside supermarkets and pharmacies. For a project that had people at heart it got very complicated.

Eventually word came through that we wouldn’t be submitting anything of the project for external assessment. So it has been gatering dust since.

The results arrived last week under a storm of issues. The SQA were taking the teachers/tutors grades and downgrading some of them based on the outcomes of the place where you studied. I got very lucky, my grade remained what my tutor submitted. I got an A.