Where I am: people

Traipsing through snow, Trowbridge, April 1986

This was taken from my bedroom window right after I woke up - a surprise & freakish event. we rarely got snow when I was growing up and it was especially unusual to get it in April.

After sharing my photographic origins, it's time to turn to where I current think I am, photographically. The usual way to think about any sort of journey is to determine where you are, where you're going and thus a route from the former to the latter. Improvement is no different.

I'm going to break this down into posts for individual subject areas: people, places, landscape.

So first to people. Often called "street photography". For most of my early photography the people I photographed were family and friends: mainly events of significance, vacations and the like. Then the "middle period" when I had my first SLR there are virtually no people shots apart from photos of travelling companions while I was travelling. I'm pretty sure I went out of my way to avoid getting people in my photos - this stems from my desire to photography things rather than behaviours.

Now I'm beginning to take quite a number of photos purely aimed at people - I'm especially interested in the way people behave and relate to one another, particularly when it's out in the open.

I've moved into B&W & square format to help focus on the subject. If it's wide, I use a 2:1 aspect ration - 2 squares together. I am a lot less hung up on technical excellence (focus accuracy etc) and more on that "decisive moment".

As I spend a lot more time looking at photography than I ever did, there are 2 photographers who i think will influence me in this area. First Henri Cartier-Bresson for his notion of the "decisive Moment". It may seem trite but I'm finding that photographing people is about a single shutter release and no second chances. the second would be Elliot Erwitt for his amazing vision & visual humour. I was looking through the official Erwitt website this week. He had a knack of spotting amazing juxta-position and then capturing it perfectly.

I'll get more into where I want to go in later post.