Shoot 2 Work Diary-City Life

Coming from my last shoot it became abundantly clear that I needed to focus on London's unique image. For this I decided to focus on the cities rich and diverse history. I wanted to contrast the wide open, old fashioned landscape of the seaside with a cramped city life, highlighting unique people and cultural influence that is only common within the city. For this shoot I wanted to take influence from photographers which I had previously researched such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. A few examples from Stephen Shore would influence me when giving London a unique tone, focusing on the tone of the image, as well as the unique people and composition which evokes a sense of otherworldliness. Eggleston's work has influenced me to search within the culture of the location in which I'm shooting, highlighting people and structures which are unique to a specific time or place. Considering London's history, I should be able to find a lot of influence within this regard. I prepared for some of the methods that I would be using within my unit 4 shoots such as selective colour which allowed me to think about the metaphorical implications and connotations that can be drawn before hand and how they can be applied to the location.

This image features another example of the type of travel photography that can be seen within the works of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston as I focus on culture and people that is unique to the area of London. However I have developed this photography to express a more sticking visual style, while highlighting themes of contrast and culture within the frame. London has an abundance of life and culture, which is what I have attempted to show a glimpse of within this image. The man can be seen playing a violin. This is an instrument that offers connotations to an older time with a more elegant form of music. This contrasts heavily with the man holding the instrument as he can be seen wearing very modern clothing, appearing to not be of the high class society which the instrument is commonly associated. I wanted to highlight this contrast by using selective colour to bring attention to what appears to be a relic among a modern setting. This is done to emphasise the way that London is a hub for many different cultures and lifestyles to clash as it explores history and blends it with the modern day. This clash of cultures would not be as common within other areas which makes the location of London even more unique, helping my work appear to offer a further sense of journey and variation. For this image, I was dealing with varying amounts of light within the image as the ceiling was non existent in some places and low lit in others. For this I had a shutter speed of 800 with an ISO of 1250. This would allow me to shoot in low light with a crisp image.

This image is of a painting found within the National Gallery. For this I wanted to explore a number of different interpretations of journey. Not only does the image date back to 1600s era Britain, highlighting the journey through time that the picture has taken in order to find itself in the Gallery, it also relates to such a specific time, place, and culture. The clothing worn by the man seen within the image is vastly different to anything within our modern world with the exception of London. Royal Guards still wear similar attire which causes this image to draw conniptions specifically to London. The image itself is so rare and unique that it cannot be found anywhere else within the world, which causes my London photography to remain greatly unique to any other place in the world. This means, when the audience looks at my work, each location will feel unique, evoking a feeling of journey along with a sense of progression. I focused a lot on composition in order to get this points across to the audience, I wanted to frame the subject within the painting as I would any other person instead of framing the entire picture. I feel that including the frame will make people focus more on the painting itself, while composing the person in a specific way would cause the audience to think more about the person within the frame and his significance within London culture and history. Considering that the Royal Gallery has low light and I was not allowed to use flash photography, I had to adjust my camera settings in order to allow me to shoot in extremely low light situations. I changed the ISO considerably to 2500 and reduced the shutter speed to around 30. This allowed me to produce a bright image without having to sacrifice any image quality.

Overall I feel that I managed to achieve my goal within this shoot as I was able to build a visual representation of London that was vastly different to what had been shown within the seaside shoot. For my project as a whole I feel that audiences can look at my work and differentiate between the locations, paying attention to differences in culture and forms of journey while feeling a sense of progression as they make their way through the shoot.