Street Photography

After being given a brief to take portraits of strangers in the street I wanted to look at a few street photographers for a little inspiration.

I've dabbled in street photography in the past for personal work and I really enjoyed it although it was mostly candid work without asking the subjects permission or without them noticing as I like the idea of them not changing for the camera. I feel you get a true representation of someone when they don't know a camera is there.

However for this project I have to interact with my subjects, ask to to take there photograph after explaining I've got to photograph strangers and make a note of there name and where they are from. This exercise will be a new one for me but I'm looking forward to the challenge and hopefully talking to people about my photography and learning a little about them.

One photographer I really like the work of is Danny Santos. He is actually a graphic designer 5 days a week and only a weekend hobbyist photographer but he has gained exposure for his street photography over the past few years and has been taking a lot of time out of his day job to photograph on the streets of his current home, Singapore. His shots are pretty candid and he doesn't interact with his subjects but I like the composition and use of light. This sets him apart from a lot of other street photographers. He likes to have his subject in the centre of the frame and they are usually only visible from the waste up. This is a style I think I want to employ in my own portraits as I think full body shots will mean a loss of intimacy between me and my subject.

http://www.dannyst.com/

Colour Swatch

This was the second assignment we've been given an in some ways it's quite similar to the first. We were each given a colour swatch and told to create images that use that color. Alongside this we had to still keep the key words in mind and try and get both a key word and a colour into one photo.

This one was much more of a challenge but was great for opening your eyes. I found myself walking around and being much more observational. 

These are my 3 final images and as you can tell, my colour was green! I found myself focusing on more natural environments as that's what I associated green with but I didn't want to have 3 photos of trees or plants so I ventured back into manchester and snapped the below shot after hours of searching!

The above shot was my favourite by far and was actually a happy accident. I was lying on the floor experimenting with points of focus between the foreground and background and settled on a mid point and was just off to one side enough for some flare to leak through the brick wall and acted as a rim light for the plant.

The feedback I got from the group critique were helpful. People picked up on the fact my colour swatch was an emerald green but my photos were a much lighter shade. Again this was the best I could do as it was really hard to match something to the shade of green and have it still convey a key word!

Keywords

This is the first assignment we've been given and it's a really broad one. We were given a list of 'keywords':

 Vibrant, speed, reflection, reflective, form, shape, texture, rough, light, dynamic, still, calm, cool, cold, urban, decay, natural, speed, slow, heavy, playful, relationship, link, communicate

We were told to go out and take photographs that represent a certain keyword either in a literal or conceptual sense.

I chose to go into Manchester as there's so much diversity there I was confident I could create 5-7 images in one shoot. Unfortunately the weather wasn't on side and it rained for the entire day but none the less I got some shots and I'm really happy with them. I tried to take a conceptual approach to my photos and wanted the audience to make up there own mind on what the word could be as some photos seemed to fit for 2-3 key words.

I'm really happy with how these turned out especially for my first assignment. I think I've got a good range of subject matter and I tried a few different things like shooting from the hip in order to get some of the shots. I gained a lot of feedback from the group critique and people really seemed to like the last photo of the 3 business men. This was my favourite photo as there's a real sense of emotion between them and they are obviously linked through work and something appears to be bothering them!