Guildford Inside Out - Culture and entertainment

In July each year for the past  five years, a three day pop music festival called Guilfest has been staged in an open park just down the hill from where I live. This is one of the largest events in the South East, and I had planned to include photographs of this event from the time that I had first thought of Guildford Inside Out. In 2011, I scouted around the outskirts of the festival with my camera, just before I started this course. In July 2012, we got tickets for the festival and I photographed various aspects of the festival which I planned to use for this project.
Image 9 - Music festival - fun costumes

Nikon 18-200mm at 200 mm; Iso 200 f7,1 for 1/125th second
For me, one of the surprising things about the festival was the large number of people dressed up in all sorts of bizarre and colourful clothing. The festival is an opportunity for ordinary people to express their individuality. I selected this photograph for inclusion in the set for this assignment as I felt it was visually one of the strongest and because it was the most colourful.
The composition also is susceptible to tipping the horizon to align with the eye line of the central figure. There are a number of photos in the Jakarta Inside Out book with a sloping horizon that worked to add interest to the composition. In this case, the horizon is not a major element in the composition, but I considered it was worth trying Nadav Kander's maxim, that it is good to include a visual element that is "not quite right".
The photograph was taken at about 7 o'clock in the evening when the sun was relatively low in the sky.
I chose image 9 in preference to another with a similar subject:
Headdress

Image 10 - Passion play
 

Nikon 18-200mm at 200mm: Iso 200 f8 for 1/180th of a second
On Easter Saturday, a Passion Play was performed in High Street. There was a large group of colourfully dressed performers making quite a spectacle. The weather was overcast but reasonably bright, allowing a reasonable shutter speed. The players moved in amongst the crowd of onlookers at quite a pace, which made taking photos quite a challenge: first to follow the action and then to get a clear viewpoint. I selected this image showing the actor playing Jesus addressing one of the pharisees in the temple for two reasons:

• The gaze and hand gesture of Jesus and the flinching posture of the pharisee make a strong subject. 
• I liked the expressions of the onlookers, adults and children in the background. Whilst a plain background would have been more striking, the faces encourage a viewer to spend a little more time browsing the image.  

The colours of the main subjects are rather muted with brown and beige predominant. Viewed in the context of the set of ten photographs, I decided that the overall effect is sufficiently colourful and bright.