For this project I am going to explore new areas and meet new people in surroundings that are already familiar to me, I have chosen to make my environmental portraits about the workers of City College, I intend on visiting every occupied office and workplace in the college buildings on Pelham Street - minimising disruption levels by using common sense!
I am going to do this in a one off shoot, borrowing the college's 24-105mm f4 L series canon lens to achieve wide angle results, as I only have a 50mm f1.8 prime lens which could potentially cause some problems as I don't actually know how much space I will have available and I want to capture both the person in the portrait and their working background, I will take a flashgun for the use of fill in flash in areas where it is too dark!
Research
Daniel Meadows, "The Shop on Greame Street" 1972
I first came across Daniel Meadows through looking at The Bus Project, it is a project that i am really interested in but I noticed that most of his portraits were done against plain backgrounds - like brick walls or garages so in the end I had a look at some of his other projects and really liked them too!
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In 1972 Meadows rented a disused barber's shop in the Moss Side District of Manchester whilst he studied at the Manchester Polytechnic. He set up a free portrait studio in the barber's shop but the images I have chosen to look at are the ones from on location on the street.
I find these interesting because of the inclusion of the environment of which the subject is in, it is almost of a world that I can't imagine - of a time before I was born it also really puts the person in the image into a context of their own time
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their mind and ask themselves
"I wonder where that person is now"
I love the composition in image 5, I can only say that it was deliberate to capture the street.
The framing in image 2 is really interesting and I love the way that the two boys are such a small part of image 3, but at the same time it is a portrait of them and there time.
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does it capture the person it captures that
moment of their life.
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Images from:
http://www.photobus.co.uk/?id=539
Anna Fox, Workstations, 1987-1988
I have also looked at Anna Fox's work titled 'Workstations' as this is more relevant to my own work in a sense that Fox has photographed workers in their own environment although I would consider it documentary photography instead of an environmental portrait.
Workstations was commissioned by Camerawork and The Museum of London and her website the text accompanying this project reads:
"A study of London office life in the late 80’s, a critical observation of
the highly competitive character of working life in Thatcher’s Britain."
Her work consists of colour images with captions underneath.
I literally looked at these images just to get an idea of how I could photograph office workers at the college, our projects don't particularly have any more in common than that.
I find it interesting that Fox's work has political meaning to the times and in the centre of the top image there are three balloons, one of each colour of the major political parties.
Images from:
Project Update & Images
It took me the whole morning to get through the college, one of the lifts was broken and the other took ages to arrive so in the end I used the stairs!
I borrowed one of the college full frame sensor DSLR cameras, a Canon 5D with the 24-105mm lens (that I spoke about in my plan) there were no flashguns though, so I had to work with only the ambient light source which did prove challenging in some situations. I knew that I would be converting my images to black and white so I just set the white balance to 'Auto White Balance' - something I haven't done for a while!
My images were shot in RAW only, most of them were shot on an aperture of F4 which gave me the best of both worlds! It allowed me to use a fast enough shutter speed with a low enough ISO to have a smaller amount of noise in my images. It was also enough to have the subject's surroundings in enough focus to make out what they are.
Exposure Lock
Taking photos in certain conditions did prove quite tricky, below are two less successful images exposure-wise.
The image at the top was the original image taken, the in camera light meter exposed for the window in the background resulting in a well-ish exposed background but left the foreground under exposed resulting in an image that was too dark. Usually I would have got an exposure reading for the background set and used a flashgun at it's equivalent so that both the background and foreground were exposed the same but there was no flashgun available so instead I used the exposure lock feature. To use this control I pointed the camera down into what would have been the dark area of the image (I chose to get an exposure reading from the man in the image's jumper, I then pressed the FE Lock button (symbolised by an asterisk) this locks the aperture and shutter speed until the image is taken or the button is pressed again - this gave me enough time to re-compose the image and take it. I could've also achieved this on Manual setting but in this case using the FE Lock was faster and easier. For most of the images I took this function worked fine but in the image above the background became over exposed.
Converting to Black & White
I always choose to shoot my images in colour but the requirement is that
they are in black and white, so I had to convert all of my images to black and
white, there are many ways to covert colour images to black and white
using Photoshop, I chose to convert using the Black & White
adjustment layer below is a run through of how you can do that.
To use this conversion method open up the image you want to convert, click on Layer, then New Adjustment Layer then find Black & White and click on it.
Once you have done that this box will appear, all you do is name your layer and then click on OK.
Once you have clicked OK you will notice that your image is now Black and White.
This is the feature I love about using this adjustment layer, not only does it convert the image to black and white it also gives you these sliders so that you can control how the different colours are represented in black and white by making the tones darker of lighter, this really can manipulate the look of the image, for these images though I wanted to tones as close to as what they were in colour as possible.
Another benefit of this kind of conversion is that it isn't applied to the image directly, it is like a mask that is put over the top so it's not complicated to get rid of or to go back and change again later (that is until you save it as a compressed file, for example a JPEG or TIFF)
My Final Prints
Below are my four final images, I have printed these at A3 size.
Rounding It Up
As a whole I would say that this has been my most successful project for this course yet, with most of the practical photographic work taken, edited, selected and printed within three days!
I wouldn't have been able to fulfill my project without the willingness of staff at the college and I wouldn't have been able to get my images up to this standard without the use of some proper college equipment! (especially the wide angle lens!)
I think one of the most enjoyable things about this project wasn't taking the photos themselves but putting down the camera for a moment to meet and speak to new people and to explore new areas, it was nice to have that freedom and an excuse to do it.
If I had more time I would've also ventured up to City College East to meet the staff members there, this would've also been a more personal visit for me as I used to go to school at the building and haven't been back there since it's closure in 2005 -so there's an idea for a future project for me!
Perhaps spending more time with each person would allow me more time to get to know them, although that said I was photographing them in their working environment in work time so I also know that they are very busy doing their jobs!
I showed my final prints to other members of the class and some of the tutors to get some feedback on my project and prints, one person commented on how fast I work as they knew that I had only taken the images the day before, others commented on them being 'Sick' I'm hoping they mean that in what I like to call 'the American good way!'
The only suggestion was that I could work on my highlights as some of my images were over exposed in areas and we talked about using the 'Recovery' tool on the RAW file editing screen - something which I later did for the images that needed it.
I feel that I fulfilled my project well I captured the staff in their own environments!
This project has also made me consider, through practicality, ways of making the 'model' feel more at ease when I am photographing them as some people that I came across appeared quite nervous about the fact that I was photographing them.
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