A Northumberland weekend – part (ii)

Just a couple more shots from the weekend which seemed to draw on individual aspects of the course material. First up is ‘a comfortable situation’. Alnwick Castle has some magnificent gardens – chock full of people doing touristy things  - like taking photos – so a little bit of candid photography was easy. In this first one I was taken by the match between the colours of the flowers and the lady’s cagoule.

In the second I was drawn by the fairly striking architecture of the tea-room, but felt it was a bit sterile without people (figures as accent) so I tried this angle which aims to capture both the architecture, its scale and, to a lesser degree, its function.

To finish with - pictures of my wife, my daughter and myself drawing on various aspects of ‘people unaware’. First up my daughter:

Then my wife. The location is a tent and the light source is three candles on a tray.

Finally, me, in a fish and chip restaurant. And for the record after my last post – this shot was definitely fun.

PnP Exercise 15: Public Space, Public Activity

Another one I struggled with – largely because of the overlap with other exercises. I also found this a bit more difficult because I gave myself a chance to get out of the habit of photographing people in the wild.

The location I chose was Westonbirt Arboretum. As a location it seemed to offer as many opportunities as a park, coupled with the advantage that people would be expecting to see cameras in action. As it happened, when we got there they were in the middle of ‘Treefest’ which meant there was more going on than usual, and that a craft village had been built in the middle of the site.

Initially I resorted to ‘comfort zone’ and started photographing the craftspeople at work but decided, rightly or wrongly, that that missed the purpose of the exercise – so I concentrated on the ‘punters’ instead.

The majority of the shots were at quite long focal lengths because I found this more comfortable, and because the scale of the event meant there was practical value in having more reach.

I have chosen to present the final selects as a collage because I feel it captures the variety of activity better than a series of individual photos. I think this works quite well but do think, with hindsight, that it would have been a better collage with a couple of craftspeople and perhaps even a couple of product shots.

Conclusions

• I need to keep doing people photography if I want to hang on to the comfort factor I’ve picked up from this course – perhaps the ‘100 Strangers’ project or something similar.
• I need to have a clearer idea of what I’m trying to achieve so that I make sure I get the right mix of shots
• The collage presentation is something that interests me a lot – I can see it’s use in the exploring functions sections coming up.