Moment and gesture

Planning

Underlying this section of the course, I am hoping to gather some photographs of the people in my home town of Guildford. One of the features of the town is that it has several excellent schools. One of the most prestigious is the Royal Grammar School, a private school for boys that is located close to the town centre. I chose to start with this subject as a few weeks ago the weather was bright with low sunlight at around 4 pm when the pupils are leaving.

Also, in the late afternoon, I expected that the sun would be shining along the street in front of the school which I hoped would add some vitality to the photographs. In the morning and for most of the day, buildings shade the street.

One of the difficulties with street photography is, in my view, to find a subject and composition that is sufficiently interesting visually. Even photographs taken by expert street photographers can sometimes be quite dull. It is not easy to find subjects whose character, clothing or expression make the picture. I therefore was looking for strong lighting and other photographic techniques to make the picture interesting.

Photography

I scouted around the street when I arrived looking for a suitable place to position myself. There was intermittent sunlight, and when the sun was shining I noticed that there were the shadows of the branches of a tree across the pavement. After some trial and error, I found that I could stand against a building as groups of grammar school boys were walking towards me across the striped lines of the pavement. I could anticipate when they were coming as I could see their shadows before they appeared. I was using my reasonably bulky SLR camera with a zoom lens but they were more interested in talking amongst themselves.
Grammar School pupils

I chose this as the strongest image from the sequence of photographs for various reasons:-

• I feel that for this project and for the Guildford people project, I should have photographs of individuals if possible rather than a group of people where the individual characters are less apparent.
• I liked the feeling of cameraderie between the two subjects emphasised by them looking eye to eye at each other. In other photos, one of them was looking ahead reducing the closeness of the relationship between them. I feel that the decisive moment was when they looked at one another.
• the shadows and dappled sunlight add interest to the foreground and background, conveying the atmosphere of the late afternoon in winter.

On the other hand, there are some shortcomings with this image:-

• Whilst I lightened their faces somewhat in Lightroom, their faces are relatively flat and lacking in contrast. With an aware subject, I would have considered using fill flash, but this would not be appropriate when trying to take photographs unaware.
• The picture may be acceptable for use in a set of photographs, but I feel it is not a strong enough image to stand on its own. I have not yet put my finger on what I could do to make a stronger image in these circumstances. A lower viewpoint would have emphasised their height, but more sky would be visible adding nothing to the scene and the pavement shadows would be lost. A higher viewpoint would probably diminish the view of their faces, the main visual focus. Next time, I should consider using the camera an angle away from the vertical.

Conclusions
Chossing or finding a decisive moment is in my view an essential part of people photography. Sometimes it is just a case of waiting for someone to look up, or look at the camera, but in other cases it can be a matter of luck (or anticipation) of capturing the moment of a glance, a gesture, a moment of light or shadow.