A second attempt at Exercise 9

Went into Carlisle today with the intent (apart from getting new tyres) of nailing Exercise 9, but it clearly isn’t going to be that simple.

The biggest problems seem to be (for me anyway) – closeness and interest. I’m guessing that I’ll get used to the former, it’s just a case of practise and developing some confidence, and maybe the latter will improve with time. But, and it’s a big but, I can’t avoid the feeling that large numbers of people wandering around shopping offers little of interest to me – I don’t particularly like doing it myself, and photographing other people doing it runs a close second to watching paint dry. This may explain why I don’t press the shutter often enough. Perhaps the answer lies in the name of the exercise – a comfortable situation.

Anyhow, I did come back with some shots that I’m prepared to show, the first two of which I felt worked better in B&W using a preset I found here. (On a related note – the source says it’s supposed to replicate the look of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama – I’ll be looking him up later)

The first I liked because of the position of the ‘To Let’ sign:

and the second because of the irresistibly grumpy look on the old chaps face.

The next two seem to work better in colour – in the first I simply like the bright colour, and alignment of the arm with the heads appearing further down the street, the second speaks for itself – it’s quite a heavy crop because I saw what was happening and didn’t have time to get closer.

Conclusions

I think I opened with the conclusions from todays shoot – this isn’t as easy as it seems. It seems to me that it would be easy to get hung up on this exercise and not move forward. To avoid this I’m going to keep revisiting it while I progress with other parts of the course.