So just to recap, for this part of the assignment I wanted to photograph people within the city without them noticing. I suppose I wanted to capture them unawares in their own space like Harry Callahan and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia but I did not want to go to the same extreme as they did, I wanted to show the environment that the people I was photographing were in.
I took my camera to London as it is a hot spot for tourists, I went to several locations and waiting for the right moment to capture the type of image I wanted of tourists taking photos of the attractions and of their friends with the attractions behind them. I also wanted to capture images of people that work in the city and thought that by shooting this at a slow shutter would show the difference between these two different types of people. The tourist, generally, spends a lot of their time stood still looking at everything around them whereas the working/business person will possibly be in an office most of the day and then be in a rush to get back home.
Below are the test strips and final images that I chose to print.
Colour printing takes quite a while to get right especially if there are more than one light source all of which are different. This is something that I had a bit of trouble with as I wasn't sure which one to correct.
It was quite clear that the first test was far too green and yellow, so this had to be adjusted by changing both the Magenta and the Yellow.
There is a chart on the wall next to the colour darkroom which tells us how to get to the correct colours by adding or taking away certain amounts of magenta and /or yellow. I did this quite slowly as I did not want to go too far.
I eventually got to a test that was neutral around the central character (with a bit of help from our technician) but the only problem now was that the print was a little to light. This meant that I had to add a few more seconds to the exposure to darken it, there was also a chance that this would change the colours that I had just spent so much time trying to correct!
Above is the test strip with an extra 6 seconds which made it darker, which gave it some more contrast but this did in fact change the colours slightly so I had to decrease the magenta by two on the final print.
This image also had some mixed light within it, but fortunately starting at the same area as the one before gave me an area that was neutral and where I could print from.
Because I was using daylight balanced film, when I came to print one of my images that was shot in daylight it came out extremely cyan. This meant that I had to decrease both the magenta and yellow by 40 so that the colours would be corrected to how I originally saw the image.
After making a few adjustments I was much closer to getting a full print, I decided to print another test strip a bit lighter because I was loosing some of the detail in the shadow areas.
This image was shoot in the daylight too so I was able to start with the colours being nearly exactly how they needed as I used the same amount of magenta and yellow as in the other tourist image. I just had to tweak the numbers a little bit as the initial full print was slightly red.
Here are my final prints, like all of the test strips they have been scanned in, unfortunately my scanner isn't big enough to scan the whole image in with the border which is one inch (so you'll have to imagine that).
Stop and Stare/Constant Velocity
Tourists at Trafalgar square during the day taking pictures of the fountains and male tourist with a DSLR looking around for things to photograph. I was watching the people behind near the fountain about to photograph it when the man in the middle walked into the frame, I quickly re focused on him and got this shot which shows the whole stop and stare idea that I was looking for.
This image was shot near Liverpool street station, it is of a walkway that goes past several offices where a lot of business people walk through. The slow shutter allowed the movement of the people to be captured as blurring, though it appears that the character in the middle has hesitated about walking in front of the camera because his left leg is quite clear compared to everyone else. This image has similarities to the tourist one above because of this central figure and because there are other people behind.
I think that I was quite lucky to have got this shot of a man taking a picture of the sunset with the houses of parliament right next to him. I had enough time to compose this image with the handrail of the bridge leading up towards the tourists and even though you cannot see the clock of Big Ben you are still able to identify what and where it is. I also found it funny that you can see sunset's pretty much anywhere in the world yet people still photograph them, especially when next to a London landmark.
This is the last image within my series, I think that it is the weakest out of all the images because there isn't really much clarity as to who these people are. You are still able to get the idea of constant movement and rushing around in the city because you can see a skyscraper in the distance on the far right and all of the people are a blur.
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