P&P: Exercise 9: Developing Confidence

Part Two of the course moves into photographing people without their knowledge or consent, what might otherwise be known as reportage or street photography.  The exercises assume the student has little or no experience with this kind of image making and so are designed to lead him or her into a public place and gradually move in on the subject, shooting first with a telephoto and then wide angle lens.  This first exercise is nothing but a warm-up:  get out there and shoot.

This morning the wife said we would be doing our weekly food shopping at the Dubai Mall.  Great.  I'll visit the aquarium.  There are always loads of tourists out in front of the big glass wall, all snapping away.  

I wore my tourist hat and bag and blended right in.  Made eye contact with several people and asked the South Asian guys if I could shoot them.  No problem.  They love posing.

The only time I felt inhibited was in wanting to shoot a Saudi family.  Gulf Arabs can sometimes be sensitive, especially the women, and as I didn't want problems with security I just let them be.  

Next up:  Shooting with telephoto.  

P&P: Exercise 8: Varying the Pose

I'm not interested in posing people, and the people I tend to associate with who might be willing to help me are equally disinterested. I looked at some examples and even sent my model a copy as a suggestion of what we could do, but once we got together we found the poses somewhat absurd. He didn't offer and I didn't insist.  I'm 53, he's in his 40s.  Who cares?

Until I had the images lined up in a collage I didn't realize how similar they looked.  Damn. Not likely to redo these as time is pressing.  I spoke with someone at OCA who said I could get a maximum 6-month extension if I complete three assignments by July 03.  The gives me six weeks to knock the work out.  It won't be pretty, but it will be an interesting challenge.

P&P: Exercise 7: Focal Length

"...in general, the longer the focal length, the more attractive the face will appear."

Review: In No Great Hurry:13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2013)

My first photography film in many months and something of a disappointment.  The subject is not interested in being filmed or discussing his work - which is admirable, actually - and spends a lot of time grumbling and wondering why anyone wants to make a film about him.  Much of the footage comes from a period when the 80-year old photographer was in the process of organizing his cluttered existence and so when he is not out walking the neighborhood with his camera, we get interior shots of the subject and an assistant digging through boxes.  Perhaps because I am unfamiliar with Leiter's work, which this film doesn't do much to showcase or contextualize, I found it slow, plodding, and largely uninspiring.  Perhaps the most amazing thing about the subject is that he has lived in the same apartment for over five decades and for a similar period documented the same neighborhood.  In two or three hundred years his work will be incredibly valuable.

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P&P: Exercise 6: Review a Portrait Sequence

This subject of this portrait session is a rather animated human who in day-to-day life is likely at the most unlikely moment to pull a face or strike a pose.  For this session I had him sitting at a desk in a classroom, with me on the other side, my DSLR on a tripod.  Light came from windows to my left, as well as a bank of overhead fluorescents.  On occasion I prompted a pose - "a student just walked in" - but for the most part the subject used the opportunity to showcase his talent - unprompted.  Unfortunately, ISO and shutter speed settings were not adequate to the task and many images were marred by excessive motion blur.  A good example of this from a recoverable image is the one of the hands-up-surprised-face.  Fortunately, the eyes are sharp enough to make this one of the more interesting images in the set, though there were perhaps equally dramatic and interesting poses that didn't make the cut. 

P&P: Exercise 5: Eye Contact & Expression

I was on the way to the nearby temple when I passed a man with a beautiful white beard.  I couldn’t stop then, but knew I could likely find him again in the same place days later.  This is a spot where independent truck owners gather to be hired out.  When they don’t have any work, they just sit on the kerb waiting, chatting, smoking, and watching Dubai drive by.

P&P: Exercise 4: Active Portrait

The brief here was to produce a set of images in which the subject was not posing for the camera, but engaged in an activity.  The purpose here was not to document the activity, but to capture the subject unaffected.

Apon is a young Bangladeshi assigned to clean the classrooms in my wing of the building.  I usually see him every evening immediately following conclusion of class as mine room is the last of the night.  I recorded him for a couple of evenings and found the biggest problem is that he likes performing for the camera.  Technically, the yellow walls seem to make the images a shade of sickly, so I reduced saturation to try and create something more palatable.

I don't feel these are the best images I can do, but I'm anxious to make some headway here in the course and don't want to get bogged down in perfecting the set.  Ideally, I'd like a faster lens, because even shooting at high ISO I still got a bit of blur and motion in the image.  Not always bad, but I'd prefer something cleaner (no pun intended).

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