I was in Oxford with my class for a Christmas shoot, and spent some time during the lunch break in the Westgate mall doing street photography. This is the second time I have tried doing so there, this time I was focussing on looking down on people from above, framing a suitable / interesting area of floor then waiting patiently for that ideal placement of people in the frame. Here the juxtaposition of bench and tiles caught my eye (although the bench and some other elements of the image have been darkened, desaturated, adjusted in contrasts etc. because they are bright / blocky / unruly to my eye). I waited for there to be people in interesting places within it. I put this one here because I'm not sure if it works. The concept, is, as the title suggests, that each third of the image contains people who are totally separate from the next yet sharing the space captured in the frame. The choice to have them going out of the frame not inward, was as far as I can remember, intentional experimentation. While I feel that Street photography offers the immediacy of free roaming exploration and a plethora of subjects, now I have got into it with a more discerning eye I realise the patience required to capture what Henri Cartier Bresson called 'the decisive moment'. Whether this is one or not, I will leave for you to debate.
I like the idea of this, and I like the aerial view, but for me it feels unbalanced and a little too closely cropped. The man in red has a good space to the left edge, but the people top and bottom are too close to the edge for me.
I think it would work better if the chap at the bottom was in the right hand bottom corner, as this area is a bit empty while the left hand side is a bit too cramped.
I do like the angle though and like that nothing is square and there's a reasonable amount of the gray paving chopped off.
Comments
I was in Oxford with my class for a Christmas shoot, and spent some time during the lunch break in the Westgate mall doing street photography. This is the second time I have tried doing so there, this time I was focussing on looking down on people from above, framing a suitable / interesting area of floor then waiting patiently for that ideal placement of people in the frame. Here the juxtaposition of bench and tiles caught my eye (although the bench and some other elements of the image have been darkened, desaturated, adjusted in contrasts etc. because they are bright / blocky / unruly to my eye). I waited for there to be people in interesting places within it. I put this one here because I'm not sure if it works. The concept, is, as the title suggests, that each third of the image contains people who are totally separate from the next yet sharing the space captured in the frame. The choice to have them going out of the frame not inward, was as far as I can remember, intentional experimentation. While I feel that Street photography offers the immediacy of free roaming exploration and a plethora of subjects, now I have got into it with a more discerning eye I realise the patience required to capture what Henri Cartier Bresson called 'the decisive moment'. Whether this is one or not, I will leave for you to debate.
I like the idea of this, and I like the aerial view, but for me it feels unbalanced and a little too closely cropped. The man in red has a good space to the left edge, but the people top and bottom are too close to the edge for me.
I think it would work better if the chap at the bottom was in the right hand bottom corner, as this area is a bit empty while the left hand side is a bit too cramped.
I do like the angle though and like that nothing is square and there's a reasonable amount of the gray paving chopped off.
Cheers, Des :-)