Exercise: Busy traffic

What I'm trying to do here is show the 'busyness' of a place.It's taken some time to find a place where I could capture this but finally I tried the exercise out at Tate Modern last weekend.

P998: F10 @ 1/5  43mm  1/13

I spent some time watching how Tate visitors moved around this space on Level 3 and found it quite difficult to capture what was happening.Looking down from the stairway didn't offer any solution so in the end I held my camera at waist level using live view to try and angle the shots to capture movement and fired off a number of shots. P998 and P999 came out the best. While not that well focused, the blurred figures in P998 give a sense of movement and the image shows different activities going on. Though the empty space in the middle suggest a crowd that has just left! P999 below looks more busy with a slight blurring of some figures suggesting movement -again some variety of activities.

P999: F10  @ 1/13  43mm  ISO 800

So, not entirely happy with the two images above I decide to look at what was happening outside the Tate. The embankment can be very crowded with Tate visitors having a break, passers-by and street performers and this can best be seen from the outside balcony on Level 3.

P1000: F10 @ 1/800  ISO 1600

Again I spent some time watching people around the musician ( P1000) and further along P1001). Taking images from above does help convey the sense of busyness but getting a good composition is tricky dependent as it is on a number of factors i.e. camera position, crowd movement and the range of activities showing how  the space is being used, its function.

 

PF1001  @ 1/640  106mm  ISO 1600