Standing back

Planning
Another significant group of people from Guildford that I wanted to photograph are the people who commute to and from the town. Mostly the commuters work in central London and commute from the main line station. However, there is a second station  for the stopping trains to London. I noticed that the afternoon sun lights up the second station and I went there on a sunny evening a few weeks ago.
Photography
I found that there were a several people waiting on a platform nicely lit by low side lighting. I positioned myself on the opposite platform in the shade from where I was reasonably unobtrusive. One or twice, people glanced my way, but they then seemed to disregard my presence.
I was using my 200mm zoom at or near to its full extension to make the people fill most of the frame. This is equivalent to 300mm on a full frame camera. Again, I needed to lighten the shadows in Lightroom as the low sunlight was casting dark shadows.


Two youths chatting

I liked the line of light around the profile of the nearest boy set against the shaded background. This photograph was taken from a high viewpoint on a footbridge.


Laptop worker

This subject is almost a sillhouette framed in an area of light. Dressed casually, his eyes rarely lifted from the screen of his laptop.
Woman texting

Woman texting

The sun was illuminating this woman from the left side casting a dark shadow against the wall. I liked the juxtaposition of the woman and her shadow.
The conditions at the station were particularly benign for taking candid photographs. There were not many people and there were few obstructions. The people were relatively static and they were preoccupied with their friends, laptop or handphone. The backgrounds were plain and uncluttered.  
I think that the middle photo, the "Laptop worker" is the most striking. This is less busy visually than the "Two youths". It has more interest however than the "Woman texting" which seems to lack some engagement, possibly because she is so preoccupied.
On the other hand, I think that the background is rather large relative to the size of the figure and that a closer crop would be an improvement (if the photo-quality does not deteriorate too much).
I should possibly try and photograph people and the train together. This presents more challenges to get both the train and the people reasonably lit. Furthermore, the people would probably be moving forward and not necessarily posing with their face visible. This could be a situation to try again with a long focal length lens if their are not too many people around.

Conclusions
The most important aspect of the long focal length for this sequence of photos was to make the subjects large enough in the frame. I am not using the foreshortening effect on perspective. The backgrounds are relatively clean and hence it is not important to use a shallow depth of field to downplay the backgrounds.