With the Plymouth Shoot coming up in a little over a week I was thinking about some ideas. I’ve been doing some research into minority groups in Plymouth and was thinking about maybe contacting the Muslim Community Centre and trying to document a little bit of what it’s like to be living in Plymouth as part of a small but strong minority. However, I’ve run into some ethical issues with this, because I don’t think there’s any way of actually telling that story in such a small amount of time and doing people justice by telling that story with the right around of context and accuracy, seeing as it might be something more catered to a long term project. So with that being said I’ll try and get into contact withe someone at the community centre but if things don’t work out I may keep it as an idea for a future, more long term project.

In my recent research I was looking for photographer’s that have photographed a lot of people interacting with each other so I took a look at Chris Steele Perkins’s work. I had just seen his name and some of his work in the power point presentation for the 140 brief and decided to take a closer look.

He’s a Burmese born photographer who left for England with his English father at the age of two and has spent his long and still ongoing career photographing urban British society. I gravitated to his early work, with his distinct black and white style documenting youth and life around him.

So recently we got given our latest module and what it will be covering for this semester. We were given 5 different projects to work on over the course of the semester:

• Relationships: For this shoot we need to document the relationships between people in 5 pictures. It can be the same people for the whole series or 5 entirely different groups of people. The aim of this particular part of the module is to truly get involved in the social interactions that surround us on a daily basis
• Plymouth Shoot: This shoot is somewhat straightforward, we’re supposed to find a story and document it in 24 hours in Plymouth. The aim is to get us to understand real world time constraints behind a brief like this because it’s a brief regularly seen in photojournalism.
• 5 Picture story and Self Directed Assignment (SDA): Again, this is somewhat straight forward, the 5 picture story is quite self explanatory. We need to document anything of our choice and tell a story in those 5 images. For the SDA, it’s basically the same, it can be 5 pictures surrounding the same story or 5 pictures of 5 entirely different stories. I reckon I’ll probably try and do the SDA in the same format as the 5 picture story seeing as it makes the most sense
• London 24 hour Shoot: This is going to be the same the Plymouth shoot. We need to find a story and tell that particular story in 5 pictures, luckily this is home turf so it should be fun

So this will be my last post, I’ve finally finished everything, all of my exteriors and interiors and the person at work project and the portraits, I just thought I’d give out a quick view of some of the portraits.

I thought they went really well, for the female portrait I had a lot of fun using a flash, it gave off a harsh look that I was going for, and for the male portrait I just got amazing light, this beautiful almost glowing yellow/orange natural light.

So here’s a few:

Caroline for the female portrait

Going back a few weeks, I just wanted to talk a little more about the person at work project, so I’ve finally nailed down the 9 that I will most likely be using, and as I haven’t mentioned on this blog before, I did a shoot in Plymouth a few weeks back as part of the project. I photographed this street performer by the name of John Kazunga. He does a routine for the local kids, and it involves an interesting take on the limbo.

He was quite a fun person to shoot, and I’m quite pleased with how the images turned out. One obstacle to overcome was definitely trying to find different angles whilst in a crowd. I was constantly manoeuvring to get different angles for various shots, whilst also not disturbing people’s view too much.

Anyway here are the 3 I’ll be using:

In thinking about our portraiture project that we were given recently, I came to think about one of my favourite photographer’s, Khalik Allah. He’s a photographer that dedicates most of his time to one street corner, the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue, in Harlem. He captures the vast array of people that surround him throughout the night.

I look to his work simply because of how unique it is. From a classically photographic point of view, his images aren’t perfect. They’re often a little blurry, saturated, underexposed, and so on. BUT they work. The way he captures these people make his photographs beautifully unapologetic and authentic. There’s a sense that he’s truly capturing that person in that image. His photographs are often posed, and he does a great job of presenting this unique Harlem swagger if you will. And without further ado, here’s some of his work:

I’ve been working on the Person at Work project recently, my latest shoot was at a quarry near Newquay, which was quite interesting. It was quite difficult to shoot, seeing as I wasn’t allowed to wander around and take photographs of whatever I wanted, I had to stick to one corner at a time and shoot whatever I could from where I was standing. This was all because of some health and safety issues, anyway it was interesting to see a part of Cornwall’s history and legacy if you will. Mining was once the biggest and pretty much only industry in cornwall, which would’ve employed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. And now, in 2016, it employs far far less. This was a relatively small operation that dealt primarily with granite. They create a wide range of different size rocks, from large blocks of rock all the way down to just a few millimetres.

So in terms of photographing, I decided to focus on one of the guys in the bulldozer, who’s job it was to organise piles of rock. His name’s Nick, he’s been working there over a decade and the quarry business is just about all he knows. So here’s several of the pictures I got of him and the quarry and a few of the other guys, PS Nick’s the guy with the glasses and hard hat:

In terms of how this shoot went, I definitely think I got some good shots but I realised just who difficult it is to produce compelling images when it’s hard to get close to your subject. Often the action was far away and difficult to capture, but I also learnt that the small opportunities I did have to get close to my subjects, I really made the most of it and snatched up those opportunities.

So this week I’ve been looking at a Hungarian photographer by the name of Brassaï. He was based in Paris throughout most of his photographic career and was quite literally a master of the night. He’s definitely one of my biggest influences when it comes to photography, but particularly night photography and black and white photography. He has a unique way of depicting these dark, damp Parisian nights, in an almost macabre way.

His Secret Paris work is probably my favourite, as it captures the intimacies of some of Paris’s bubbling underworld of brothels. He had a way of encapsulating the dark night and the time period in an incredible fashion, many of his shots are incredibly cinematic, now, here are a few of my favourites:

6 weeks into this blog now, so we got our latest brief about a week or so ago and we’ve been tasked with photographing exteriors and interiors, and I immediately gravitated towards night photography, something I really enjoy. It’s a great opportunity to continue to explore this kind of photography. And to that I add that I just got my first shoot done a last week and it was just a few long exposures on Falmouth Harbour but I was quite pleased with the results! It was nice to get back into a bit of night photography, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to do it.

Here’s some of the shots from the first shoot:

I was quite pleased with the images, it was a really clear night which really helped the light reflect nicely off the water, there’s a nice atmosphere to the images as well, a solid start.

In continuing with my recent project on people at work, I finally got my first shoot done! I went into town on Monday, to photograph a bluegrass musician by the name of Tom Dale. It was nice to have the first shoot done, although it was very challenging. First off the shoot took place in quite a crowded pub with a limited amount of angles to explore so the spacing was tough to get the shots. And most challenging was without a doubt the lighting, it was really dark. It was tricky to get shots that didn’t have a little motion blur and I couldn’t really push the ISO too far because my camera doesn’t handle ISO well at all. Alas it was great to get this project moving and make some progress.

Here are some of the shots from the shoot: