Week 2 Practical

This task was followed on from our week studying documentary. In all honesty, at this point I had mixed emotions about documentary. I did not like the idea of having to be imposed on other people's lives, i did not like having to essentially feel like a stalker. I did not want to capture images that people may not have wanted to be captured. However, I feel like the end result of this task slightly gave me a different perspective on documentary.

After researching as a class on the photographer, Henri Carter-Bresson, we learned about his style of waiting for the decisive moment in photography. We were asked to replicate this style. Taking out cameras we were asked to set ourselves up in a location on campus to take our own decisive moment. We could either take a trigger happy approach- constantly taking pictures and then selecting the best one by narrowing them down in the editing stage. On the other hand, we could take an approach to take images cautiously. Our subjects could be people, animals, objects, anything that was able to create a decisive moment to make the image stand out.

When I set out onto the campus, I was very unmotivated as I felt awkward taking images of people that I had not asked to take part. However, I thought i was prop myself behind a bench with a couple sitting on it. After a few minutes i was able to take a few shots and thought that they would be satisfactory to take back to class.

When looking through my selection of images, I was shocked to find that the images i had been taking came out very successfully. I caught a great moment of light intimacy between a couple, I especially liked my choice to create short depth of field in the background which gave focus to the foreground of the two subjects. It could be argued that the image is slightly too dark, however I liked it as it gave the image an essence of a silhouette feature to it. This also gave a bit of dignity to the couple but also enabled us to be spectators in a quick, but heartwarming moment.