Originally published January 15, 2009
What spurred me off to get this blog going is the online MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography I’ve just started doing with the London College of Communication. Apart from its being a course requirement, I think it could be good fun and would come in useful when I want to look back at the thought processes behind my work. I’ll probably also use it for the occasional rant )
I decided to do this MA to try refine and maybe take my photojournalistic work in a different direction, as well as to develop a more disciplined approach to the genre. After shooting the same things for several years, I feel the need for some new stimulus and think this is the ideal way to do it as the course is highly interactive. It should also help me formulate and bring to fruition a couple of book projects I’ve had in mind for some time.
First online lecture with Paul Lowe was held yesterday. Apart from a few audio glitches, it was a great start and I’m looking forward to the next two years with great excitement. I’d been concerned I was going to miss this session as I was out shooting yet another landing of would-be immigrants, just as I’d been doing the previous day (one of those pix made the Wall Street Journal pix of the day http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2009/01/13/pictures-of-the-day-96/ , that sort of thing is always a huge boost )
A couple of days ago I shot my first of the three assignments I need to get done before my initial tutorial. Person at work is the theme. We’re going back to basics on this one - one camera, one fixed lens, 400 ISO, around 72 shots in all, black and white, manual exposure and manual focusing. It’s been years since I shot in that mode. The shoot proved to be pretty frustrating because of those restrictions, though I perfectly understand why they were there. I was photographing a craftsman named Chris who makes very fine silver filigree in a poorly-lit garage. He sits at a desk against a wall, so most of the time I have to shoot him from behind or the side – his face is in shadow so it’s hard to manually focus on his eyes or face to capture that intense look of concentration. The old Canon manual focus cameras I used to use had all sorts of focusing aids on the focus screen, today’s AF cameras don’t. I think I managed a few half-decent shots of his hands as he worked on small filigree pieces, but that’s pretty much about it. Even though I was trying to take a fly-on-the-wall approach, Chris kept stopping what he was doing to explain the process, which is understandable in a way, but it kept breaking the flow. So all in all, not the best of starts. Perhaps being rather tired as it was at the end of a very long intensive day didn’t help either.
MAPJD person at work 1 - EDIT - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
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