Describe
fully any one of your own photographs.
Follow the timeline of the shooting, beginning with circumstances or
background. Take at least a few hundred
words and don’t worry about being concise.
The aim is completeness, including factual information about the subject
and the decisions you remember taking leading up to making the picture.
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John, the Winemaker (749 words)
 |
| Final Choice |
Well,
here's the problem, how do I choose just one image? I finally decided on the picture above after
thinking about all the thousands of pictures I have taken since moving to Lyme
Regis in 2009. They seem to be mainly of
the beach and sea front but my all time love in picture taking is of informal
portraits of people and children as they go about their daily lives.
When I was working on the module ‘People
& Place’ assignment 5 I was asked to think up my own subject and after, an
email discussion with my then tutor, we came up with the overall subject of
portraits of characters who live in Lyme.
I could have taken all the town’s worthies, but I also wanted to get the
everyday people who live here. I see
John and his wife often and we talk about his hobbies of wine making and
collecting Victorian nude pictures (mostly postcards), which he displays in his
shed, not that I realized that at the time of asking him to be one of my
‘characters’. I discussed where would be
the best place to photograph him and then I discovered he had what most men
have or desire to have which was a shed in his garden. We agreed a date and
time and I turned up on the designated date with my equipment.
The shed was small and cramped and full of wine
demi-johns, bottles of ready to drink wine and books on wine making on the
shelves. What took me by surprise was
the number of old pictures of nudes that were pinned up on the wooden walls. I asked John some questions on wine making
and how he had collected his postcards to get him to relax. I took stock of the
whole situation as he talked.
As I said, the shed was very cramped, so
much so that I had to work with the door open to get suitable pictures of the
different areas. The lighting was a
fluorescent tube which buzzed and flickered at odd times so not much help
there. It helped that I was working with
the door open as that enabled me to balance out the yellow/green tinge that you
get with fluorescent lighting but I still needed to use my flashgun (not the on-camera flash as that was too bright and too directional). I wanted to use the flash attachment as I
could direct the light to bounce off the ceiling or walls and I had more
control of the amount of light that it emitted.
I decided to work my way round the shed
taking pictures as I went with John holding various items which were relevant
to the work of wine making and I got him to talk about it as I worked. John is very loquacious and didn’t take much
encouragement to talk about his hobbies and his life as he is now in his 70s. He did offer to remove his hat but he didn’t
seem the same person, as I have never seen him without it.
I felt the picture that I chose encompassed his main hobbies of wine making and collecting but showed him with a different expression on his face, that of an appreciation of his favourite tipple, a glass of his ‘hooch’. When I had taken all the pictures I wanted he downed the drink in one swallow.
Technical
problems
The
problems I encountered:
·
Very small area to work in
·
Fluorescent lighting giving a
bad cast to the pictures
·
Odd angles to walls due to
cramped conditions
·
Owner wanting to ply me with
drink
Post-production
actions
The post-production work which needed
correction:
·
Fluorescent cast to pictures
partially eliminated by flash but I had to use colour balance palette to remove
slight green effect
·
Skewed angles of walls – used
the Edit/Transform to skew walls upright
·
Cropped to eliminate open
door. Tutor felt the open door added to
the picture but I felt it distracted the eye from the subject
·
Lighting levels needed slight
adjustment as combination of natural light through the door and flash over
compensated some areas and left some, ie, corner behind subject, to dark.
