Person at work
First assignment is here. Having read previous year students’ blogs, I knew ’Person at work’ was coming and yet I was not ready for it. All subjects I had thought of were in low light indoor situations; somehow I didn’t count on having ISO restrictions.
The whole set of restrictions:
-manual exposure
-manual focus
-only a 35mm or a 50mm lens in each of the three sessions required
-no flash
-ISO 400 or 800, preferably 400
-black and white images
I am not comfortable with manual focus. I usually shoot, not being in action situations, with the single focus point mode. I find it extremely hard to set the focus through the viewfinder.
I don’t have a 35mm lens and I never feel comfortable with the 50mm, in fact, most of the time I use a 28mm. So there you go, another big challenge here.
I am not used to shooting black and white images. I do have some but only because during their post-processing I thought they look nicer in monochrome than in colour. In other words, I did not intentionally shoot them in b&w.
Comfortable or not, it really feels like a great challenge. Even more when I think of images of ‘people at work’ I have shot before.
Yes, in places like India this is quite an easy subject. But how about at home?
And here comes one of my biggest worries for the whole course: how to shoot interesting photos in my own place.
Anyhow, looking for inspiration I had a look at Sebastiao Salgado’s book Workers. Not sure if it was such a great idea… the amount of good images there felt totally overwhelming.