I thought I'd try to post a bit more so I'm going to try to give a few examples of my photos together with some of my own thoughts. Photography is a highly subjective endeavour so I don't make any great claims to their brilliance. It is a useful exercise for myself to reflect on what I see in my own photography. I hope it may help in understanding the photographic process and how photos are "made".
The first photo is a case of pure serendipity. I went out with some other members of the Glasgow University Photographic Society to do some street photography. As usual, the weather was a bit rubbish, but not raining which is always a plus. The generally grey atmosphere lends itself to black and white photography. It's been a long time since I shot a piece of film (though I have a few loaded film cameras lying in drawers) so I do black and white conversions in Lightroom. In this photo, the black and white tones reflect the grimness of the person's plight.
I used the LiveView feature to hold my camera at waist level to take a few photos discreetly. The Sony implementation allows full-time phase-detect AF in LiveView so there are no issues with quick shots. It allows it to be truly useful in general shooting, rather than other DSLR versions which are really only good for static/tripod situations. I snapped off a few photos while surveying the square. I thought there might be an interesting shot in the sequence but it wasn't until I got back to the computer that I found the right frame.
By sheer luck, I managed to capture the poster in the background with the girl in a police hat wagging her finger at the person. I was totally unaware of the background when I took the shot. If I had seen it, I might have tried to angle myself a bit more to the left so that the girl would be more to the left of the bench. But I think it works more or less as it is.
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| Glasgow 2011 |
The first photo is a case of pure serendipity. I went out with some other members of the Glasgow University Photographic Society to do some street photography. As usual, the weather was a bit rubbish, but not raining which is always a plus. The generally grey atmosphere lends itself to black and white photography. It's been a long time since I shot a piece of film (though I have a few loaded film cameras lying in drawers) so I do black and white conversions in Lightroom. In this photo, the black and white tones reflect the grimness of the person's plight.
I used the LiveView feature to hold my camera at waist level to take a few photos discreetly. The Sony implementation allows full-time phase-detect AF in LiveView so there are no issues with quick shots. It allows it to be truly useful in general shooting, rather than other DSLR versions which are really only good for static/tripod situations. I snapped off a few photos while surveying the square. I thought there might be an interesting shot in the sequence but it wasn't until I got back to the computer that I found the right frame.
By sheer luck, I managed to capture the poster in the background with the girl in a police hat wagging her finger at the person. I was totally unaware of the background when I took the shot. If I had seen it, I might have tried to angle myself a bit more to the left so that the girl would be more to the left of the bench. But I think it works more or less as it is.
