This experiment was made because we wanted to look at how different people would interact with the setup. From discussing this idea/plan with the two people who were observing with me; Hayli and Claudia; We thought that there could only be four outcomes:
1. Person(s) walk directly past without noticing.
2. Person(s) walk over, read the sign, and walk away.
3. Person(s) walk over, read the sign, pick up the camera without taking a photo, put down the camera and walk away.
4. Person(s) walk over, read the sign, pick up the camera, take a photo with the camera, and then put the camera down and walk away.

The sign we left, said in french (we hope, although Google translate isn’t the most accurate) Hello! We are Jersey Photography students, and we would like your help for a project. Please could you take a photo using our camera. Please do not move or remove the camera. Thank you 🙂 We then later added another sign above with slightly bigger writing which said, Please can you take a photo, thank you. Have a good day.

Within our Lunch hour we ate at a cafe/restaurant which was only a couple of metres away from the tree where we had placed the camera, so that we would be able to observe how people were interacting with it. The most common of our four expected outcomes were numbers 1 and 2, which was what we had expected. We were slightly surprised by just how many people spent a minute or two reading the sign, to then shrug it off and walk away. We thought this might be down to:
a) people not being used to this kind of thing and so being slightly suspicious of it;
b) not wanting to be seen doing this thing which is slightly odd;
c) if they were alone, not wanting to seem lonely to us, the anonymous students;
d) not being able to understand the atrocious French on the sign.

We did however, get a couple of people who acted differently to how we’d predicted.

First there was a teenager who was in a group, who first took a photo of himself, and then got all his friends together to take a picture of all of them.

Then, after he had taken the photo of all of them, one of the girls to get out her phone before walking away, and took a picture of the setup.

Next to where the tree where the camera was set up, was a temporary art shop, where about four artists work was displayed and they were trying to sell it. One of the artists came over to us and asked if she could borrow the camera, but said that she would replace is after and said that she would take a photo of her work;

When looking through the photos after, I also noticed that in one of the pictures, the young girl who took the photo, without knowing, got us in the back of the picture (yes we were all staring because we were intrigued as to whether they would actually take the picture, which they did, and we were also waiting for our food)

I also think that something happened to the film for some reason, so we lost (we think) 9 of the photos taken by the people, all of the film had been used (27 images) however we only got 18 images back when we developed the camera (the last 10 were taken by us just to use up the rest of the film) so I only have 8 pictures to show (which I am still very happy with, as I only expected about 3/4 images).

These were the 8 images we got, in the order they were taken: