Single perspective - Looking down and shadows

michswiss

This is a series I took a month or so ago. I went out specifically to capture shadows and ended up setting up a single shot in a worn down building three floors up on an exposed staircase. The only differentiation will be the people and shadows. There are 80+ images in the set taken over ~3 hours and I intentionally limited the current collection to square crops. Thank goodness I'd brought water as it was hot and bright. Here are ten from the set.

I'm interested in comments, critique and coaching about individual images, setting up for a scenario or aesthetic. But, hopefully, something here is enjoyable.

1) The Set. I varied it 3 times over three hours.

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10)

bdcolen

michswiss wrote:

This is a series I took a month or so ago. I went out specifically to capture shadows and ended up setting up a single shot in a worn down building three floors up on an exposed staircase. The only differentiation will be the people and shadows. There are 80+ images in the set taken over ~3 hours and I intentionally limited the current collection to square crops. Thank goodness I'd brought water as it was hot and bright. Here are ten from the set.

I'm interested in comments, critique and coaching about individual images, setting up for a scenario or aesthetic. But, hopefully, something here is enjoyable.

1) The Set. I varied it 3 times over three hours.


4)


6)


10)

I see these three as your keeper set - which one of the three is your call, though I lean toward the first.

More important, this is a terrific exercise - I in fact use an exercise just like it called The Decisive Moment, the decisive moment being that instant when you see the photographic possibilities in a scene,and then start working the scene to get the best image possible out of it. That is precisely what you did when you saw the staircase with its shadows and geometry. But then you realized that the real photo lay in completing the composition with human elements.

This is a great exercise, and one I would urge you or anyone else to try over and over.

marikris

I like the whole set and the idea of space, time and how tangible and intangible objects occupy that same space. I think that as a sequence, the pictures tell some kind of story. Like, in the first photo, it's a static space, which to me is a key introduction. But when you add the figures, the shadows come alive and walk the space. I even like the planks of wood that the guys are holding up because it's another space for the shadows to play on.

Also, I like that there are varying levels of the space. I noticed that as we move down the row of pictures, we can see more of the stairs and less of the window/door with the canopy. I feel like that helps visibly track time, or mimic the path of the sun, which directly affects the shadows.

Anyway, this is me rambling again lol.

PS - B.D. we had a section on Henri Cartier-Bresson in my class last year, and I have always found the Decisive Moment fascinating: "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." -Cartier-Bresson

bdcolen

marikris wrote:

I like the whole set and the idea of space, time and how tangible and intangible objects occupy that same space. I think that as a sequence, the pictures tell some kind of story. Like, in the first photo, it's a static space, which to me is a key introduction. But when you add the figures, the shadows come alive and walk the space. I even like the planks of wood that the guys are holding up because it's another space for the shadows to play on.

Also, I like that there are varying levels of the space. I noticed that as we move down the row of pictures, we can see more of the stairs and less of the window/door with the canopy. I feel like that helps visibly track time, or mimic the path of the sun, which directly affects the shadows.

Anyway, this is me rambling again lol.

PS - B.D. we had a section on Henri Cartier-Bresson in my class last year, and I have always found the Decisive Moment fascinating: "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." -Cartier-Bresson

That is indeed what he said - But the reality of what he did, which one sees both in looking at contact sheets and at least one of his books, and watching a video of him at work, is he worked his scenes like a banshee, shooting and shooting and dancing around his subjects shooting. His genius was both seeing the possibilities in the scenes, and his ability to compose as he did. Most of his images were not about the people in them, but about the shapes, the compositions and forms.

rutt

BD and I have a slight disagreement about this. I had to do a presentation on a Magnum photographer for BD's class and chose HCB. My thesis was that he grew from being a surrealist with an extraordinary eye for composition into an passionate people photographer, one of the best PJs and portrait photographers of all time. His career was neatly divided by WWII during which he was a soldier, a POW, escaped, worked for the resistance. I think he did his best work after the war, especially documenting partition in India. Lots of those shots were "decisive moment" shots in the sense that we imagine: just one chance to get them. They don't light Gandhi's funeral pyre a second time. The collaborator is only accused once in war crimes court. There are lots of examples.

I am not saying that BD is wrong. No doubt HCB also worked scenes as BD describes. Some of his most famous images only really make sense once one thinks of them that way. I'm just saying that by the time he published "The Decisive Moment" in 1952, he wasn't really being disingenuous about how he worked.

I'm thinking I'll post the images and notes I used for this presentation, probably in a separate thread in the "theory" forum.

bdcolen wrote:

That is indeed what he said - But the reality of what he did, which one sees both in looking at contact sheets and at least one of his books, and watching a video of him at work, is he worked his scenes like a banshee, shooting and shooting and dancing around his subjects shooting. His genius was both seeing the possibilities in the scenes, and his ability to compose as he did. Most of his images were not about the people in them, but about the shapes, the compositions and forms.

marikris

Wow this is interesting! Rutt, I can't wait for you to post this thread.

Back to michswiss: was there a particular reason the you varied the camera angle? I mean, was it your intention from the start to have three different angles?

rutt

See this thread.

bdcolen

rutt wrote:

BD and I have a slight disagreement about this. I had to do a presentation on a Magnum photographer for BD's class and chose HCB. My thesis was that he grew from being a surrealist with an extraordinary eye for composition into an extraordinary people photographer, one of the best PJs and portrait photographers of all time. His career was neatly divided by WWII during which he was a soldier, a POW, escaped, worked for the resistance. I think he did his best work after the war, especially documenting partition in India. Lots of those shots were "decisive moment" shots in the sense that we imagine: just one chance to get them. They don't light Gandhi's funeral pyre a second time. The collaborator is only accused once in war crimes court. There are lots of examples.

I am not saying that BD is wrong. No doubt HCB also worked scenes as BD describes. Some of his most famous images only really make sense once one thinks of them that way. I'm just saying that by the time he published "The Decisive Moment" in 1952, he wasn't really being disingenuous about how he worked.

I'm thinking I'll post the images and notes I used for this presentation, probably in a separate thread in the "theory" forum.

Ah, Rutt, Rutt, Rutt...Yes, there was only one "instant" in which the torch touched the wood, and there was only one instant in which the enraged woman confronted the collaborator as she did, but both of those were on-going, photographic situations which extended for moments if not hours. I would be willing to bet that HCB shot numerous images in each of those situations, and we are seeing the perfect image that emerged from each.

I am in no way suggesting that he was not a genius - I believe him to be one of the truly great artists of the 20th century. As you know, in many ways of think of him more as an artist whose paint brush was camera, rather than as a photographer in the traditional sense. But then that makes sense in that he reinvented photography.

michswiss

marikris wrote:

Wow this is interesting! Rutt, I can't wait for you to post this thread.

Back to michswiss: was there a particular reason the you varied the camera angle? I mean, was it your intention from the start to have three different angles?

I was definitely trying to channel HCB when I went out that day. I had a vision of trying to get a "decisive moment" which is fraught with risk of spectacular failure. I found my perch by going up. Up in that I took every staircase I saw that wasn't blocked or obstructed and I checked vantage points and possible compositions. This particular set of stairs (the one in the frame is for a separate building) was old concrete construction with open pipe railings that gave me options. And the sun's angle would only improve .

I hadn't really planned on three angles, but it's hard not to make some adjustments over an hour or so of sitting and hitting the shutter release.

I realise there isn't much that can be critiqued on the photo's themselves. I intentionally used the same full square crop and the same B&W conversion for each angle. All 80+ are on my smuggie page. If there's a way to improve or refine, I'm all ears.

rutt

BD, others, let's adjourn the discussion of HCB to the thread I started in technique.