Exercise 5.1 – Using your camera as a measuring device.
Use your camera as a measuring device. This doesn’t refer to the distance scale on the focus ring(!). Rather, find a subject that you have an empathy with and take a sequence of shots to ‘explore the distance between you’. Add the sequence to your learning log, indicating which is your ‘select’ – your best shot.
When you review the set to decide upon a ‘select’, don’t evaluate the shots just according to the idea you had when you took the photographs; instead evaluate it by what you discover within the frame (you’ve already done this in Exercise 1.4). In other words, be open to the unexpected.
I found this exercise challenging, even the simple request of shooting a subject you have empathy with the first stumbling block. Creative juices we were not working to help look at this from a different angle.
I was procrastinating for far too long and decided while on a short visit back to the UK to take some very snapshot style shots of my parents while we were visiting the Martin Parr Exhibition at The Hepworth. Although, I do think they may kill me when they find out I used them as a subject.
The shots are “snapshot” in style, showing my parents in different situations as the patiently wandered around with me. I wasn’t sure how they would turn out as genuinely did not have a specific trait that I wanted to show. The shots have other elements wandering into them, down to pure composition caused by me trying not to the noticed.
However, I find in they show 100% of what why parents are like, when together, to people who while they inseparable and have been for 52 years, they have their personalities
The final selection of an image was hard e.g. Image 2, is almost how I always think of them; my dad doing something we are not quite sure what or why and my Mum looking on in wonderment. Image 10 doesn’t contain them and I was shot because I was showing my dad something about my camera, but there is significant symbolism in the hat. My dad would never have worn a hat when he was younger, but both his father and my mum’s father wore flat caps. How it sits between 2 coffee cups, which could represent mum and dad, shows how over the year my father has become a combination of both my grandfathers.
But I want to choose image 5:
This is perfectly how mum and dad interact and discuss. What is adding to this picture, even more, is that unintentional captured them in front of a picture of an older couple in a fish & chip restaurant from Martin Parr’s Last Resort; this couple have the mannerism of my mum’s aunt and uncle. And while they are not, as mum did not recognise the resemblance, it looks as if they are discussion a long past family member.
Discovering this in the shot on review two weeks later has made this an emotional shot.