Photo Essay- "Life around Portsmouth Harbour"
For my photo-essay, I aimed to focus on a realistic approach. I used the location of Portsmouth Harbour as an active and busy place that always has wide-ranging people all in different scenarios. This led to me using the decisive moment approach as the subjects in my photos do not realise they were being photographed; this allowed me to show society without the knowledge of the camera. Henri-carter Bresson influenced my photos with his theories on the decisive moment. Bresson’s theories are that the subjects do not look at the camera, the photos are not staged, and there are no political/social agendas forhis photos. They depict real life as it is, which is exactly what I aimed to demonstrate in my photos. When shooting the photos I adjusted the Depth of field to focus on the mundane things such as a railing or a rope and then have the people or scenery in the background out of focus. This allowed me to depict how the common things in life can make good subjects for photojournalism. I also experimented with higher shutter speeds of 1/260 to create society "frozen in place". This is shown in the image 13 of my photo essay. Another techincal aspect I used was the depth of field. I set the apature to higher numbers as well to increase the "blue line" which is signigficant in photo 12 of my essay; the railing is in perfect focus whilst the background is blurred.
Before Editing After Editing I wanted to keep it realistic by using minimal editing. For example, I chose editing techniques that enhanced the photos without the obvious knowledge of them being edited. When I went to the harbour I noticed how it was quite a colourful location; I choose to enhance this by making the colours more vibrant in a very subtle way which can be seen in the photos above. |
Gunwarf Quays
For a second essay I went back to Portsmouth but focused on Gunwarf Quays. I aimed to show the "hustle and bustle" of the multiplex centre close to the holiday times. As opposed to my first photo essay I interacted with the subjects more which allowed having more than just decisive moment photos. I wanted to keep some of the same techniques used in my first photo essay but change the location. I wanted to capture the essence of a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon during the holiday shopping time. A lot of the images were shot using a high shutter speed as I didn’t want any blur and I wanted the images to look “frozen in place”, in photograph 9 this is evident as I had the shutter speed on 1/200. Some of my images in this photo essay also demonstrate how I experimented with the aperture settings. In photo 9, i had the camera on the AV mode and had the aperture set to F.12, this allowed me to have the woman in the background out of focus and the Christmas tree in perfect focus to emphasis the holidays. Whilst taking photos of crowds I thought a lot about my framing, in particular the rule of thirds which is best demonstrated in photograph 15 as I took this photo from a high angle to make gurantee everything important was in shot. I used RAW processing for these photos and adjusting the contrast on a few as I was shooting indoors so some of the images came out too dark. I wanted my photos to look natural and depict reality as accurately as possible therefore I only slightly adjusted the photos through editing as to keep a realistic look to them.
©2011 Alyssa Patel. All rights reserved.
