Assignment 2 research

Not sure which option to choose for this assignment. I like both ‘crowds’ and ‘views’ and the option of coming up with my own assignment. I am in the process at looking for a new wide angle lens so if I get it might choose the ‘views’ option, if not I’ll go for the ‘crowds’ option.

28 Feb 2015 – Went to Caerphilly shopping today and took my Samsung CSC camera with me as an after thought as I was not going out on a proper photo shoot day, but it was the day before St David’s day so I knew there would be some opportunities to take some crowd photos.

I took images of a stilt walker/brass band/crowds of shoppers/fishermen/dog rescue charity/small girl dressed in national costume/children flag waving. I enjoyed it, it was fun to do, but I was wary of taking images of children in Welsh costume as it such a touchy subject . The castle was a great back drop and as I was there taking pics of the front of the castle, a young couple came up and asked me if I could take a picture of them using their own camera which was a dslr, so I did that for them.

If I did crowds I could either cover an event or do street photography. The problem with doing an event is that usually they are one offs and you have to get all the images in one go. If I did something like shoot a local market, I could go back weekly and re-shoot if needed.

Books I am researching for this brief:

Contemporary Landscape Photography – ISBN 978-0-8174-3968-2

Creative Photoshop Landscape techniques – ISBN 978-1-57990-708-2

How to photograph Absolutely Everything – ISBN 978-1-4053-3307-8

My Initial Ideas:

Crowds – I would like to use this assignment as a different way of shooting crowds for eg taking images of feet and movement rather than head shots. I could do this by going to an event or shopping center, sitting on a seat with the camera on a small tripod or gorilla and shooting at foot level using a long exposure.

Crowds – I regularly go to market day on a Tuesday at Abergavenny. It is a great place to catch different characters selling their produce. Sometimes its a full farmers market including selling animals once a month and once a week its just market stalls inside and out. I have photographed it on several occasions, once for an A level project years ago and various times since. Its a great place for street photography.

Views – I am considering purchasing a wide angle lens and if I did, this would be an ideal opportunity to use it. I would also like to try HDR photography as I love the quality and depth of the images.

Views – as I live in quite a mountainous area there are a lot of ‘lightning trees’ about. These are trees struck by lightning. They are usually split/distorted/burnt/bleached by the weather and are fascinating to look at close up and from a distance.

FINAL IDEA – going to do Crowds

Definitions – Oxford dictionary

COLLECTION – the action or process of collecting someone or something, a group of things or people, crowd, body, company, troupe, assembly, gathering, throng

CROWD – a large number of people gathered together in a disorganised or unruly way, mass, army, herd, flock, swarm, press, crush, flood, array, congregation, occupy all.

Annalysing the brief:

Create a series of between six to ten photos.

Use the exercises from Part Two as a starting point to test out combinations of focal length, aperture and viewpoint for the set. Decide upon a single format, either vertical or horizontal. You should keep to the same combination throughout to lend coherence to the series.

• Crowds make a great subject for photography, not least because they are so contemporary. A city rush hour is a good place to start but events also offer great opportunities to photograph the crowd rather than the event. The foreshortened perspective of the telephoto lens will compress a crowd, fitting more bodies into the frame, but it can also be used to pick out an individual person. A wide-angle lens can capture dynamic shots from within the action.

After contacting Wendy my tutor she suggested I looked at the work of Hans Eijkelboom, who uses the camera at waist level to photograph people who wear the same things, then displays several of these together as a collage.

Ten questions for Hans Eijkelboom

http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2014/october/02/ten-questions-for-photographer-hans-eijkelboom/

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/23/hans-eijkelboom-street-photography-tribes-people-twenty-first-century

Idea – Maybe I could do a similar project at the flower show to Eijkelbooms, but with people carrying their plant purchases about? Use different levels – low down, from the ground/waist level/high up

Choosing a single format is going to be relatively easy as I will be shooting from waist/knee/floor height and probably via a gorilla tripod so it will lend itself to landscape format.

I’ve been looking into collective nouns – a group of people, a swarm of bees, a shoal of fish, herd of cattle. Does the brief have to be about people? for eg, a shoal of fish taken from a pet shop I recently visited. Would this work?

I have bought an angle viewfinder for my camera. I am hoping to use this to photograph crowds. It wont be obvious that I am looking through the viewfinder so I am hoping to get some natural images. It will also be easier to get images from lower down – waste/ground level.

(This is not my image – stock photo)

stock image not taken by me

Ideas for images:

People queuing for the train/people on train/people getting on-off train/crowds of feet/one person standing still while others move around/up and down steps/bags and flowers from low down. Last year they had concerts/displays/stalls/exhibition stalls/talks by famous gardeners/food tents.

I would like to inlcude as much colour as possible as their will be new types of plants/flowers there. Maybe use one or two b+w shots of the crowds and emphasise one part of the image in colour to make it stand out?

Couple of photos of crowds from RHS Cardiff 2014

What I like about these 2 photos is the dramatic sky in the background. On the ground they have large temorary paths which on these 2 pics lead into the images. In the 2nd image there are a lot of people carrying bags, I particularly like the older lady in the middle looking towards me smiling. This is the type of character I would like to get images of. Last year they had a display where you could climb a tree on ropes, it would be goos if I could do this and take a picture of me looking down on the crowds like a swarm of bees.

There were loads of people pulling these little trucks around with plants in.

I had thought of using this as a way of mimicking Hans Eijkelbooms work, included below images of people with trucks of plants and carrying plants in Hans E’s style.

One of the things I liked about photographing the crowd is that they were just as colourful as the flowers on show. Many of the women wore flowered clothes.