Life of the Harbor

My first idea was to travel to Portsmouth harbor and take photos of harbor life, fishermen, the Royal Navy and tourists. I hope to capture some interesting subjects. 

I had this idea firstly because it was relevant to one of our chosen ideas and secondly because of my research into Cornell Capa and how he captured people from behind. I think I would try to photography people sat on their own without anybody else in the frame to draw the focus away from my main subject. 

 The Commuting Stream

My second idea was to visit the train and bus stations and photographing commuters. I would hope to capture the blank emotions and dehumanization of people plugged into Ipods and avoiding social interaction. The locations for this include Winchester train station and Winchester bus station. 

This idea stemed from my inital documentary idea about commuting which was not selected however I still felt it was worth perusing as a photojournalism project.

 My shoot can be broken down into three sections, the first group of images are all taken at the harbor during daylight ours, the second group were all taken at the train station and the third was taken at the harbor during the night.

Group 1:

I found the camera relatively easy to use in manual mode after practicing earlier on in the day. For my first few dozen images I used the exposure bar to help me set the right exposure for the image however I soon began to only use this as a guideline as I gained confidence in using my own judgment. I set the ISO at 200 for the majority of the first group however as the sun went down I upped the ISO to 800 to compensate for the lack of light. 

I wanted to experiment with the shutter speed at the harbor to capture the movement of people as a blur while the buildings and pavement stayed sharp, however when I tried to do this I soon realised that I would need a tripod to achieve this. I set the shutter speed to 2 seconds and the image came out blurred due to my hand movement. 

Group 2: 

I found the train station at night a unbalanced place to take photographs, although the overhead lighting was very bright the camera would only expose correctly at an ISO of 6400. On the photo entitle 'Pumpkin squash' I had to slow down the shutter speed to 1/50 to compensate for the light levels, fortunately the subject was motionless so the image came out clear. 

On the image 'feeling empty' I lowered the aperture to f/4.5 which allowed me to raise the shutter speed slightly to 1/125 which gave me a crisper image than on slower shutter speeds, although the image is relatively dark I think it matched the dull empty atmosphere of the train station.

Group 3: 

I decided to wait at the harbor until after nightfall to experiment with the 550D in a dark environment. Only one of the photographs made it into my final 12 images because I found it difficult to capture a crisp image due to the slower shutter speeds that were needed. I managed to find an area that gave of enough light so that I could raise the shutter speed to 1/8 and lower the aperture to f/4.0. I do like the photograph because of the bright lights shining off of the water and the contrast it demonstrates between the harbor at day and at night.