For this photoshoot, we went to St Malo for a day in order to photograph the different buildings and take pictures of people without manipulating their poses/ what they were doing by not making them aware they were being photographed. The aim was to mimic the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the decisive moment. To do this, we ensured that we didn’t try to bring attention to ourselves or get people to purposefully pose for a photograph as the goal was to capture natural, real behaviours. However, sometimes this wasn’t possible due to people spotting the camera and then asking for photographs or changing their behaviour. When we visited, it was quite cloudy which meant we had to adjust the camera to cloudy mode. Additionally, we wanted to test out using different shutter speeds in order to get movement in our images. To do this, we lowered the shutter speed which allowed us to capture the movement of different things eg people and vehicles. On the other hand, if we wanted a sharp, in focus images, we increased the shutter speed.

In order to minimise down the many photographs we had taken, we imported them into Lightroom then began by giving each image either a white flag (if we wanted to use them) or a black flag (if we didn’t want to use them). This narrowed it down by a half approximately but there were still too many. So, next I ranked each of the images out of 5 stars (5 being the best and 1 being the worst). Once I had completed this, I then selected the filter button and made it so I could only see the images with 3+ stars. Finally, to finish narrowing down my selection I assigned each of my images a colour: green (I wanted to use as a final image), orange (potentially use) and red (not going to use).

With people

Once I had narrowed down all of my images, I then gathered all of my images with people in and put them into a folder. I then used Lightroom to adjust each of my images eg the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks, whites and colour hue, saturation and luminance. These were my final outcomes:

Overall, I like how these images came out as I think I manged to successfully photograph some decisive moments where people were acting naturally and unaware they were being photographed. However, I also liked the images were people were aware of the camera and looked at it/ posed as I feel from each image you get a slight insight into that persons life and highlighted to me how different everyone is.

Black and white

Finally, I decided to turn some of my favourite images black and white. I think these images are good as the people are acting naturally and not looking into the camera. Its also interesting to see the different types of emotions people were displaying whilst I was taking the photograph. I think the image with the lady holding the umbrella is mysterious as you cant see any of her face and I like how she is in focus and the background isn’t. This brings the attention to her yet the viewer cant work out anything more about who she is or what she looks like due to the umbrella covering her. Additionally, I think the image with the man holding the dog is interesting to look at due to the lady’s facial expression which makes you curious as to what they were talking about in order for her to produce that reaction. Finally, I think the last two photos are good due to the framing of the people due to the trees on the bottom left image and the unique positioning of the people in the bottom right image (as usually the people are in the centre of the image but this time they’re to the right). Finally, they are both in good focus and sharp.

Without people

I then put all of the images without people in into another folder. Next, I edited all of the photographs the same way I did for the ‘with people’ images.

I think this photoshoot was good as I managed to capture a wide variety of different buildings from a range of different angles. For example, in some of my images I zoomed out quite far in order to get the whole building/ street in but in others, I zoomed up into certain parts of the buildings. Additionally, some of my photographs were taken from head on but some were taken from a side angle. This helped to create more variety in my work and make it more interesting to look at. Most of my images had high focus and sharpness. However, one problem I encountered whilst taking my photographs was that due to the sky being cloudy, it meant that lots of my images looked quite dull where the sky was. I tried to minimise this by using the burn tool on photoshop and experiment around with the colour section on Lightroom in order to enhance the blue in the sky.

Black and white

Finally, I made some of my images black and white. I think these images turned out well and create more of a gloomier atmosphere. They’re in good focus and sharp/clear.