Developing my Confidence

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Well, I can honestly say I enjoyed my first reconciliation with street photography a lot. It admittedly started off quite sluggishly as I was in too confined a space to get unsuspecting shots of strangers without them becoming suspecting ones! However, once I got into a more open environment, Oxford Street rather than Covent Garden, I started to get into a ryhthm.

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   The key technique, I found in order to catch people unaware, while still considering composition, was to look for subjects that were standing still, rather than in motion. With this approach I got a lot more shots I was pleased with and I have enclosed my favourites from the session.

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   Because I employed this technique I felt a lot more comfortable in the latter part of the session and it helped dramatically with capturing the expressions I was after. I also discovered (in the majority of cases) I liked using longer focal lengths with a large aperture so the subject was separated from the background.

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   If I was to be critical of some of the photographs I took it would be that the timing could have been improved. This was because I realised it could make a big difference to the quality of the photographs in terms of interest. I was therefore looking forward to tackling that in the next exercise.

   So after the rain had finally released its grip and I had just finished the first exercise, I was feeling happy, if not a little guitly. Guilty because I had intravened on some people's privacy in what I felt was the softest of manners and happy because it went so
swimmingly!