Portrait of a stranger.

Portrait of a stranger.

     For this week's tasks we was shown photographs and links for videos of photographic artists of Thomas Ruff, Iven Penn, Mark Hobbs and Tom Woods to study and to take inspiration from. This gave me a chance to use my Christmas presents properly for the first time and was quite eager to go out.

     The venue I choose to do this task is our local park (as we are still in lockdown) as this was the place nearby that I would see people going along with their daily exercise. I used my recently acquired walkabout lens as I did not know what focal length I would need so this lens would be sufficient for anything from a wide angle to long telephoto. This would cover most things (except a shallow depth of field). 

                       

     The first photograph was of 2 people walking their dogs in the park. I took this photograph at the maximum focal length that the lens was capable of. This gave me the ability to keep a long distance away without disturbing the individuals involved in their everyday business. I find it is a good method to use when you want to take photos of people whilst, they are unaware of you taking photographs of them.

                        

     The other two photographs I used on this blog was using the lens at it's shortest focal length. A good way of taking photographs of strangers I found was to point the camera upwards towards the trees and have the subject on the bottom of the photograph. Not only does the subject thinks that you are just taking some photographs of trees but I found out it is a good method of incorporating the surroundings in context with the subject. This gives a pleasing result to the overall photograph once you get used to it.

     Another method I did find useful was to take a photograph of people walking after the have passed you. Generally people don't mind having their backs taken (as you are not taking a picture of their faces) and generally don't lead to any confrontation. I did find out that this lens I could use directly in sunlight without much flare so I was lucky to take a photograph with the direction towards the sun.

     Overall I like this task. This task went hand in hand with the type of photographs I take anyway so I was already familiar in what I wanted to achieve (even though I was not familiar with the equipment I was using). I was lucky to have a day when the sun came out without having most of the snow melted and took full advantage of this day to try my Christmas presents.