Exercise 9 Revisited

What: The main brief of this exercise was to take a number of photographs of people gathered together in an outdoor situation

Where: Edinburgh, Outdoors

When: Morning and Afternoon on a bright sunny day.

How: I had a route planned that I wanted to travel so that I had enough time to locate a photograph subjects that I found interesting.

Having taken a break for several months due to the ongoing progression of my ill health, I decided that I should revisit this exercise and start where I left off.

This time around my confidence was a lot lower; I am uncomfortable directly approaching people and talking them into allowing me to take a photograph. I felt however that I really needed to start rebuilding my confidence again, so I did a mixture of people unaware and people that I approached and spoke to.

As we travelled the route I spoke to people as well as photographed them using a combination of a 50mm prime lens and a 70-300mm telephoto lens. I tried not to use the telephoto lens where I could, but occasionally I had to be out of the main thoroughfare to avoid being knocked over.

It was quite a challenge using the 50mm lens and not to attract the attention of the people being photographed. However as the day progressed my confidence rose as I worked through the exercise as I felt happier talking the photos.

To begin with I found a sitting position where I had 360 degrees of view; I could see quite a distance and because I was sitting away from the main thoroughfare I was comfortable enough to sit with the camera and watch people as they went about their day.

As people passed, I was able to see them come into view and I was able to frame them in the cameras view finder and wait until they became well composed within the view finder. The longer that I sat there the more people started to ignore me and allow me to point the camera in their direction.

When using the 50mm lens, I did not want too great a depth of field but at the same time I did not want it to be razor thin. I decided on an aperture of f/2.8 as I knew that I could obtain the depth of field that I wanted without isolating the subject from their surroundings.

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/4000 second, ISO 160, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/4000 second, ISO 160, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

I was surprised by how close I could be to the subjects without them knowing that I was choosing them for the image.

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/4000 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/4000 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

I noticed a large number of people who were either concentrating on their mobile phone or talking on their mobile phone and was at this point that I realised that a lot of people were very involved in their own “thing” and had were not really paying attention to what was going on around them.

I decided that for a couple of shots I would focus on the people in my immediate surroundings

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/1500 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

I was surprised to find that I could photograph people who were in fact quite close to me, and who had been sitting close by for a while and who were no ignoring the fact that I was photographing individuals and were giving their implicit trust and permission.

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/750 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

Having become very comfortable with the concept of photographing people again, I moved on down the street into a local market full of German produce.

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/3000 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/60 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

I could see that some of the stall owners were initially watching me as I lifted the camera to my eye, but then just went back about their business. Everyone appeared to be quite happy that I was not intruding and did not notice that I was picking out who I wanted to photograph.

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/750 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

After that I moved onto the main street and continued to photograph.

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/2000 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

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Nikon D80, Exposure Mode Manual, focal length 50mm (35mm equivalent 75mm), aperture f2.8, speed 1/750 second, ISO 100, Daylight white balance, Centre Weight metering, Hand held camera, 50mm lens,

To begin with I did feel uncomfortable and mostly photographed people side on as they passed as I did not want to attract too much attention, but as I carried on I found myself standing in front of people attempting to catch their expressions. As I gained a little confidence I was happy to see that most people were not too bothered that they were being photographed and some were oblivious at being photographed.

I tried to capture some gestures but did not manage much as lot of people were either on their own or too busy with their own thoughts.