Assignment 2 - preparatory thoughts

Preparing for Assignment 2 has been very different to preparing for Assignment 1. For the first Assignment I spent a lot of time looking at the brief and coming up with ideas of what to shoot before taking the first picture. Given that the subject for the second Assignment is street details and the requirements are abstract design principles I've not been able to develop any ideas based on shooting a specific subject. Instead I'm just having a few sessions of walking the streets with the brief in my hand and looking for inspiration.

I've had one session so far, wandering round the backstreets of Crewe. I created some images that met parts of the brief, but I think I just captured the easy ones that most fit my preferred style - lots of verticals and horizontals. So I'm taking to to the streets of Stoke-on-Trent tomorrow and I need to be more mindful of points, triangles, patterns and rhythms.

I'm back to Liverpool on Tuesday. Again I'll be focussing on the back streets.

Actually there are a couple of constraints that I'm putting on myself rather than just walking out blindly.

1) I'm going to avoid including people in the pictures unless they're explicitly part of the design. I want to do this on the basis that people will always draw attention and cause distraction from the design.

2) I also intend shooting in colour. My original thought with this Assignment was that I would shoot in B&W but somehow this felt a bit flat and also contrived when I looked at my first shots for the exercises.

3) I'm going to use a prime lens with a full frame equivalent focal length of 55mm. I think this will help give all the shots a consistent feel and as a standard focal length lens it create a natural, "normal" feel to the shots. In addition, it will force me to approach the subject and work hard to get the right composition as opposed to lazily using the zoom.

4) The nights have "drawn in" and I've noticed how the fluorescent street lighting has an interesting effect of reducing the variation of colour and tone and so making things seem a little more graphical and geometric in nature. I want to see if I can capture and use this in some of the shots for this assignment.

5) I intend to spend far less time processing the photographs in Lightroom. I think I over processed some of the shots in my first Assignment (though I was doing a lot less processing that I used to do on my shots before I began the course!), and so will be trying to shoot in jpegs in order to limit myself and encourage me to get it right in camera.

6) I want to try and take inspiration from the photographers I've been inspired by up to this point. The ones which seem most relevant are Lewis Baltz, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Inaki Bergera, Tina Hillier, Bob O'Connor, Marten Lange, Orjan Henriksson (all of whom I've written about in this blog).