OCA - TAOP - Exercise 8

Exercise 8, A Sequence Of Composition,

The aim of this exercise was to produce a sequence of compositions, capturing an event as it happens leading up to the final, best image.

I found this exercise very interesting and extremely useful as it forced me out of my comfort zone. I have never really taken any shots of people, let alone of strangers and especially in public! It was a great learning curve, which helped to build my confidence in taking shots out and about in the street.

For my subject, I had initially ventured into Nottingham city centre with the intention of capturing some of the events covering St. Georges Day at the castle, however, due to my poor planning I had arrived too late and everything had already finished. While wandering around the city centre, I could not mistake the sound of a brass band playing music, following the music, I found my subject - The William Booth Memorial Hall brass band, a part of the Salvation Army, who hold public services every sunday in the city centre.

I stayed for the whole service, taking photos following the event as it unfurled before me;

This is the initial shot, as I first found the source of the music. Here you can see they are playing mid song, shortly after arriving and setting up. From here, I decided to start trying to get shots of individuals in the band, to give a sort of introduction into the different faces and different people;

By this point I had moved over towards the left hand side of the band, as it was the clearest spot for me to stand without getting other spectators standing in the way, or being so close as to disturb the band during the service.

At this point, I opted to move back towards the right as some of the spectators had moved on giving me enough room to move about. I felt that this would be a wise move to get a new angle on the band and to get a clear shot of some members that I thought looked interesting, but were otherwise hidden behind other members when I was stood to the left.

I LOVED this guys drum!

By this point the service was beginning to draw to an end, so I moved myself into a central position, fairly close to the band to try to get some frontal shots of people from an angle that I had not taken any shots from yet. I didn't want to miss the opportunity, so I forced myself to get a bit more up close and personal.

I would class the previous shot as the final, best shot, depicting the bandmaster bringing the service to a close. It is in my opinion, one of the better shots of the set, especially with it being so close to the end of the sequence. I did however, manage a few more shots as the band were preparing to march back to the Memorial Halls for a second service. This shot, is more aesthetically pleasing than my next shot, taken seconds after, for reasons that I will explain further below.

The following shots, I moved around a bit more, trying to capture as much as possible before the band marched off, trying to follow the organisation led by the band leaders, of the other band members.

Overall, as my first attempt at these sorts of shots, I am quite pleased with the set. It has definately given me a huge boost to my confidence and will inspire me to go out, find and capture more public events such as these.

The downsides of this set are apparant to me, I should have used a much more shallow depth of field to place more emphasis on the band and to blur out the details in the background such as shop signs and advertisments. The "Sale" sign in the background of some shots is extremely distracting, and I found it borderline infuriating when processing the images, however there is not much I could do about that as even with a shallow depth of field, a large red strip would have still been quite distracting in the background. More careful composition and position when taking the photos, and post cropping should be exercised in the future too as there are odd body parts floating in some of the images, such as an arm here, a persons back there, all of which are distracting.

Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise and feel that I have learnt alot from it, I cannot wait for another similar opportunity to arise for me to capture another sequence such as this one and build on what I have learnt from shooting this set.

For anyone who is interested, the William Booth Memorial Hall website - http://www.wbmh.org.uk/