One Square Mile: Portraits As Documentary

Lesson 2 Portraits as documentary. For this lesson we had to take 5 photographs of people and consider how we would compose them. We had to take into consideration the location, the lighting and whether interaction with the subjects was to be shown in our images.

Some styles I tried to recreate was:

 1)Deadpan where the subject has a blank expression and is staring directly at the camera. Deadpan is mainly used in documentary photography and is becoming increasingly popular.

August Sander uses this this technique when he photographed German people and their jobs. The deadpan technique that August Sander uses removes the subjects personality but the location is kept.  These photographs are from his first book 'Face of our time'.

2)Using flash to separate a person from the background by underexposing the background and then using flash.

Alex Sturrock uses this technique as he is a street photographer. The flash separates the subject from the background whilst also using a shallow DOF. These images are from his collection of street photography.

3)Setting a location and then asking people to be in the area.

Philip Lorca DiCorcia has Hollywood style set ups and gets people to pose in them who haven't made the american dream of becoming famous. These photographs come from his series 'Hustlers'.

Here are the photographs I took:

I used flash for these photographs to underexpose the background and have the subject separated. 

  I decided to photograph these people because I wanted my images to tell something about them. Before I took my photograph I told the subject to either not look at the camera or have a dead pan expression. 
Overall I think my images are good but they could have been sharper as my f number varied between 4 and 8. On some photographs there is too much space above the subjects heads but I didn't want to crop them out because it shows a bit of the environment they are in.