Monday, 4 November 2013

Evaluation


When I first got the brief of street photography I didn’t really know much about it or anyone who was well know for it.  So I started to do some research and look at other peoples work to get a better understanding of the genre. I didn’t really think much of the images that I was looking at and seemed to be slipping into the mind of ‘anyone could take that image’ but it wasn’t until I got my first manual camera a small Olympus OM 10 I started to realise it was a bit more than just aiming and shooting. 

At first I found it challenging just putting the film into the camera, as it was all completely new to me. But the hard bit was the part I thought was going to be the easiest. And that was actually walking round the streets taking the photos. I wasn’t too sure why I was finding it hard to just take photos of the street and of the public, but I did feel really strange.  I they got to learn how to develop the film. This was really exiting as I couldn’t remember what was on half of the film and was keen to find out. But once again it wasn’t as straightforward as I had thought. I found it challenging having to do everything in the dark as it seemed unnatural to me, especially clicking the film around the reel I found that really difficult. But because so much time and effort goes into developing a film it makes it so much more exiting to see what the outcome it going to be. After developing it I soon realised that on each film there might only be a small handful of images that I might actually want to use.

The next time I went out shooting film I had watched a small documentary on Bruce Gilden and how he portrays street photography. And I found that it helped me a lot when I was going for my second attempt because of the way he was walking around and taking images he wasn’t worried in the slightest of what people thought of him. And I think this is defiantly where I was having a problem before. As I did feel strange so I was constantly worried that other people thought, that they might think I was being really odd and strange but I shouldn’t have cared because it wasn’t odd or strange at all it was just my images portraying the streets of Hartlepool. So in order to get over the fear of just taking photos and looking strange I thought I would try what Gilding does and just take a few images of people close up. It turned out that people weren’t that bothered about it and when people did comment, it wasn’t that bad.


Once I had made a start to overcome my fear of photographing, I had a look at what photos I thought looked good and why? I came across one of a man on some steps and this got me thinking about interesting angles and pictures that take your eyes on a journey in a certain way around the picture. So I looked at a street photographer call Eric Kim and he had some pictures that I really liked that included bold lines that and strong structure,  this is what I focused the rest of my films on to have a collection of five images that all had a factor that linked them together.

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