People and activity - Planning

The objective of Assignment 2 is to produce a set of 10 or so images of people in some form of meaningful activity which must be a single event or location.

Clearly, the activity needs to be something with sufficient subject matter for ten photographs. When taking photographs of people in the course of their daily activities e.g. at the market, it is not easy to find even a handful of visually interesting subjects. I was therefore delighted to find out that there was to be a costumed re-enactment at the Spike Heritage Centre, a former Victorian Workhouse, last Saturday. I have visited the Spike a few times before and had an idea what it was like inside and I had some notes on its history. Even better, it is only five minutes walk from where I live.

I contacted the organizers of the event to check whether they would have no objection to me taking photographs of the performance. I offered to let them have copies of the photographs if they wished to use these in their activities.

I would have liked to have asked for more details of the performance at the same time. However, I thought this could be putting the organizer to too much trouble when they would be very busy with final arrangements for the event. I was pleased that they responded promptly that I could take photographs for the purposes of this assignment, although they did not wish me to distribute photos publicly without their approval. I considered this was reasonable.

Two performances were planned so I decided to go to both as the tickets were not expensive. This would give me two opportunities to take photographs and I could use the second performance to fill in gaps and take photos from different viewpoints.

Looking back at my history notes of the Spike, I had a fairly good idea what they were likely to be doing. This was a part of the workhouse where migrant workers and vagrants could stay for a night or a few nights only. The long term destitute lived in a separate building. The regime was harsh but provided bare necessities for people who otherwise would be sleeping rough.

The daily routine was:-

• Queuing outside for the gate to be opened
• Waiting in turn in an external shelter to be registered
• Registration and provision of food
• Having a bath and change of clothing
• Sleeping in the locked cells.
• Working breaking stones, cutting wood or producing oakham from old ropes.

My intention was to take a variety of portraits:-

• Individual portraits of performers dressed in character
• Photos of the larger scene - queuing or waiting, eating etc.
• Full body/head and torso photos of performers engaged in activity
• Variety of postures, standing, seated, reclining
• Decisive moments of drama, if any.

The building has a mixture of natural light from skylights, windows and ventilators, and artificial light. Mixed lighting should not be an issue as I wanted to produce black and white prints for this subject. I thought that the shadows and contrast of monochrome pictures would convey the harsh atmosphere in the workhouse when it was active.

Light levels in the interior were also likely to be quite low. I was expecting to set high ISO levels of 800 or 1600 so that I could hand hold the camera with the 18-200mm zoom lens. I debated whether to use my 18mm f2.8 prime lens, but I decided against this as I did not know whether I would be able to get clear viewpoints of the performers. In addition, for close cropped faces or heads, the distortion from the 18mm lens is undesirable. The zoom lens, on the other hand, would give me flexibility, allowing me to take close ups and candid shots from further away. The graininess and smoothing effect of using high ISO should in this case not be a major issue and it could even enhance the "historic" appearance of the pictures.