PnP Exercises 9 and 11– Cours de Saint Pierre, Geneva

After a trip round the cathedral I had 15 minutes to myself in the square, so I popped on my 50-200 and did a few shots of people going about their daily business.

This group of ‘tourist angels’ caught my eye with their bright T-shirts

On the opposite side of the square, and for the duration of my stay, these two rather more sophisticated ladies were chatting the afternoon away.

It was a gorgeously sunny day and this young lady’s parasol caught my eye. I particularly liked the halo effect which seemed kind of appropriate outside a cathedral. This is one example where being closer in and using a wider angle lens would have allowed me to change perspective and provide more context to highlight that particular thought process.

Conclusion

I found this a very comfortable situation. There were other people with cameras, there were enough people around to act as subjects and using a long lens meant I didn’t have to invade anyone’s privacy.

Exercise 9 - again: On the underground

On the underground a photo by nmonckton on Flickr.

Nearly forgot this one - I think this was actually my first conscious attempt at a 'street photo' having read through the course material. I just spotted the juxtaposition between the lady and the newspaper headline and couldn't resist.

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.

First steps in street photography

I am one of the many who find the idea of taking photos of complete strangers who have not given explicit consent quite daunting. I have managed to convince myself – rightly or wrongly – that part of the problem is the very intimidating and obvious nature of a large black d-SLR, and treated myself to an Olympus PEN E-P1 with a 17mm lens (34mm equivalent). So that’s my technical excuse dealt with.

Before I have a proper stab at Exercise 9 I thought I’d take the camera out and get a feel for what street photography involves. I’d already picked up a couple of tips from various websites and blogs so the camera was set to manual focus at about 10 feet to reduce the shutter lag and f/8 to get reasonable depth of field.

A couple of things became quite quickly apparent:

• with a 17mm lens you have to get very close to fill the frame with a subject. I knew this but had not really considered the implications for street photos;
• a fairly quiet morning in Wells is not packed full of opportunities, nor is it easy to be inconspicuous in scarcely populated streets;
• the camera noise is less conspicuous than I expected, particularly if there is any traffic or other noise,
• shooting from the hip is pretty hit and miss – even shooting with the camera hanging round my neck is pretty vague;
• the optional hot-shoe viewfinder is considerably easier to use than the screen on the back; and,
• for a beginner it feels easier to sit in one place and wait for opportunities rather go hunting.

I did manage a few photos that I’m prepared to share, although I make no great claims for their quality. Of the four below I had to crop a couple quite heavily to compensate for the small size of the subject.