Tests; lighting and portraiture.

I have been experimenting with aperture and shutter speed in a quite dark environment, attempting to create contrasts between light and shadow, especially with regards to the two portraits shown here; when I shot for the project I am to manipulate this more through the use of black and white.

Influences

Child with a hand grenade by Dianne Arbus.

Having so far looked at some very intriguing photographers on the course, I would like to appropriate and apply their style to some of my own work, as well as influences of realism from certain filmmakers and cinematographers.
For me the two most interesting photographers I have encountered so far have been Dianne Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Though both unique I believe them to both posses an unflinching quality in their work to capture the real and the alternative in equal measure.
Another primary influence for me (coming from a film studies background) is the work of directors in the Italian neo-realist movement, the British new wave and the French Nouvelle Vague. Most of the works from these periods in cinema have an air of documentary realism that adds an urgency and candid energy to them.


Still from Roma, città aperta(1945) shot using fast stock and natural lighting, to give more of a sense of newsreel footage than the turgid gloss of a Hollywood picture.


Behind the Gare St. Lazare by Cartier-Bresson, who saw the camrea as a new way of painting captureing things exactly as they were: "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant."

Introduction and Breif

Brighton seafront seen from North Rd flat


This blog will follow the trials and tribulations of my first attempt at serious photography, Having played around with a canon A1 in my earlier days, the concept is not completely alien to me, but digital photography is to some extent; having never owned or properly operated a digital SLR.
My original plan for this project (entitled Place,was to create a portfolio of images based in and around a typical trades and labour club on Lewes road in Brighton, this having fell through, I want to now concentrate on the idea of a market(s), places of trade in Brighton. A theme interesting in both aesthetics of place and in portraiture of their in habitants. As emphasised before I wish to shoot this is a realist mode of documentary photography, in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson or the cinematography style of neo-realist filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini.