Thinking about location - planning

I chose to visit the surroundings and interior of the new concert hall in Guildford called G-Live to look for places suitable for portrait photography. The building is a modern geometric structure with large white-walled open spaces, lit by natural light from a glass frontage and skylights. It stands in its own grounds and there is only one side where it is close to neighboring buildings. The building is open throughout the day, it is relatively quiet in the daytime.

I visited the building late morning on a bright but overcast day to scout out the possibilities.

There were several reasons for choosing G-Live to look for photography locations:

- For this project, I considered it was important to find settings which had notable visual qualities that would contribute something to the image. I believed that this building would be suitable: I could imagine a fashion photography shoot taking place there.

- The building has only just opened a few weeks ago. Hence, it was a new place to explore.

- It is close to where I live and hence easy to visit several times.

Major areas of the building exterior are glass panels around the entrances, and relatively featureless plain white walls around the rest of the building. Neither of these seemed to provide visually interesting features for a photo.

Three places seemed to have some potential:-

Bench on east side of building

The distant brick wall is quite shady and would provide a plain dark area against which the subject should stand out (the electricity junction boxes on the wall would need to be concealed or cloned out). The bench provides somewhere for the subject to sit, and the bench, stone and ornamental grasses would provide unobtrusive texture and colour.

Acute angled space on east facing wall

One of the decorative features on the outside of the building are wall areas clad with brown textured tiles. One of these by the north entrance of the building makes an acute angled space on an otherwise creamy white wall which faces east. I envisaged that a photograph could be taken from the position shown, where the subject would be in front of the white wall with the shaded brown tiles behind. The dark lines between the light coloured wall tiles angled by perspective would represent an extra visual element to the composition.

(This angled shape is reminiscent of the studio set up used by Irving Penn in a number of portraits taken in the 1940's.)

Light panel sculpture

According to the plaque, this sculpture will play a sequence of coloured lights when triggered by receipt of a text message from anyone. I envisaged that the shape and plain surface could be interesting as part of a portrait photograph. From most positions, the background was bright sky and too busy, but from this position and focal length, the brick facade of the building across the road provides a relatively plain background. The sculpture faces west so the light was largely from behind at the time of my reconnoiter visit. I would expect to use this location later in the day when the light is from the south or west.

I identified three potential places to photograph a person in the building interior:

Settees in cafe area

When I first looked at the cafe, I did not think that it would provide a suitable place to photograph someone as the glass walls showed bright areas outside and bright reflections of the interior. However, this problem did not arise from this viewpoint on the floor above. The geometric shapes and neutral colours of the settees also should add visual interest to a photograph.

Balcony at the front of the building

There is a glass fronted balcony on the first floor of the building facing east. I imagined that the diminishing perspective of the dark window frames on one side and and the white pillars on the other could provide an interesting frame in which to place a subject. This area is well lit by daylight from the glass wall on the left hand side so I expected to take a picture from the camera position used here with the light from the side and above. I noted, however, the tinted windows create a colour cast, which would need to be corrected.

Balcony above the north entrance

I rejected many places in the interior as unsuitable for a couple of reasons:-

- Away from the glass walls, a significant part of the light came from electric lighting. My experience has been that it is difficult to achieve reasonable skin tones in such mixed lighting conditions.

- It was not easy to find places where there were structural shapes and shadows that created a sense of depth and place.

I found this viewpoint however looking up at a narrow verandah on the floor above. I thought that the shadow areas underneath the verandah, and the passageway on the right hand side provided a reasonable feeling of space. The verandah is lit by daylight from a glass wall just in front of it, as well as light from a skylight from above. The colour of glass again creates a greenish colour cast that would need to be corrected.

Conclusions

The criteria that I used in selecting these locations as suitable for taking portrait photographs were:-

- visual interest: I was looking for a viewpoint with characteristics that would convey to a viewer the shape, depth and nature etc of the scene. I did not want a plain flat background of the kind I used in project 1.

- plain background: The scene should be complementary in colour and tone to the person being photographed. It should not over-power the image of the person.

- lighting conditions: I wanted a place that was well lit. The lighting should not be a mix of natural daylight and artificial light.