Preparing Landscape for Assessment

Finally, I managed to package my Landscape course up and send it in for assessment, a year of work wrapped up in brown paper.  Just hoping it got safely to where I sent it!

I am blogging this as I want to document how I pulled the material together as an aide-memoir for this course and because preparing for assessment is now a key stage in the newer courses. So what did I do?

1. First of all I printed all of the photographs at A3 with a minimum of a 2cm white border.  I organized the images on the paper slightly higher than the center of gravity.
2. For Assignment 1 and the Portfolio I printed on Ilford Smooth Pearl which suited the rich and varied colours I was working with.  For the other assignments I used Epson Heavyweight Matte, excellent for deepening the blacks in the B&W Assignment 2 and for softening the Autumn colours in Assignment 3.  Assignment 5 was a toss-up and I went for the matte in the end.
3. Most of the prints I created as I went along with the course.
4. I also included the original photographs as submitted to my tutor plus any modifications or substitutions to show how I responded to the input.
5. For each set of photographs I then printed a "contact sheet".  In effect I created an A3 PPT slide with a table that contained the names of the photographs and a thumbnail for each.  I feel that this will enable the assessor to see the whole set together before then moving through the individual photographs.  I hope this will add an overall context to each assignment.
6. I printed my essay and then ring bound it using a small binding machine that I have.  I backed the essay with a sheet of black card and used a clear sheet of plastic as a cover
7. I did the same with my assignment notes, tutor reports, and my responses.  This means that the assessors will have a booklet containing all of the relevant assignment documentation in one place.
8. All of this went into a Silverprint portfolio box.  

My goal is simple, to make it quicker and easier for the assessors to understand my work and hopefully give them more time to assess the photographs.  I guess they go through a great many similar boxes of prints on the assessment day, anything I can do to make my work more accessible cannot hurt.