Sue G People and Place Learning Log : 2015-02-01

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Exercise : Standing back....

The 16th century buttercross in Chichester is the centre of four busy shopping streets so I started here for this exercise in using longer focal lengths for 'across the street compositions' and waited to see what came up..

And yes,I had delivery vans getting in the way, usually at a really moment for an interesting shot and inevitably passersby looming up and either blocking my view or joining the composition in an unhelpful way such as below:

P802: F8 @ 1/200 155mm ISO 100

A lovely expression of being fed up on the seated gentleman's face - who was he waiting for? In the instance of pressing the shutter, he was joined in the composition by a passerby on the extreme left...sadly..

There were bonuses in being some distance away. Using a longer focal length allowed me to take images without the subjects being aware or self conscious ..this made for some interesting expressions being captured. I experimented with a a small range of distances from 128mm to the full extent of my lens i.e. 250mm. With the lens fully extended and hand held, I had a few problems with slight camera shake despite the image stabiliser. It would have been easier with a tripod but I would have been less than incognito.