Exercise 38: A Narrative Picture Essay

I had the good fortune of having an interesting event fall into my lap. A group of cleaners visited my apartment building to wash away a year's worth of sand.  They do this in the most dramatic way possible, by rappelling down the face of the 200 meter, 30 story building with high pressure hoses.  There was little time to research or plan, simply to follow these guys and shoot. I spent the better part of the day with them, from their early morning set-up to late afternoon clean-up, shooting from on the roof and on the ground.

I took approximately 90 images, which on reflection seems little, but for the purpose of the assignment turned out to be adequate.  I think I didn't shoot more because once the men were hanging from ropes, there were few unique angles from which to shoot. One angle I didn't pursue was from an apartment balcony and that was simply because of timidity.  I don't know anyone living on that side of the building and didn't feel comfortable ringing a stranger's doorbell to ask if I could take photos from his balcony. 

Once I had all the photos assembled, the next challenge was finding a way to do the layout.  Freeman suggests using prints that can be moved around on a table top to find a suitable layout.  Not a bad idea, but given that I have to produce something electronic to post here a rather time-consuming adventure. I looked at the possibilities in Lightroom's Book Mode, but after fidling with it for 15 minutes saw that it was going to take a considerable amount of time to learn to produce whta I needed.  A coursemate at the OCA Photography forum said he had done his layout in MSWord and that seemed like a simple, easy-to-implement solution. What you see was produced in exactly that way. 

The biggest problem I encountered with the layout is that many of the best shots demand space, either vertically or horizontally.  It was hard to find images that could be reduced.  In particular the vertical of the facade must be big in order to see the tiny cleaners perched on the side.  It is otherwise a rather plain image and I think I made the best compromise by reducing it as much as possible and surrounding it with smaller images. 

Altogether I think it looks pretty cool.  How about you?

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