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Convenience Food

   In the beginning of Magnum photography, the context was primarily the picture magazine, a sort of weekly journal. For example,  Picture Post or Paris Match. These would devote many pages to a photo essay - A sequence of pictures laid out to form a narrative on a certain theme.

Location:  BlackBushe Market

Image 1: Bin - This image was taken to show the amount of food consumed at the market. I changed the image into greyscale because I wanted to show the negative attitude the fast food portrayed.

Image 2: Chip Van - I took this image because I wanted to show the workmen behind these fast food stall. I liked the iconography of the word 'jumbo' because I thought it worked well with the man's physique.

Image 3: Chinese Man - I really liked the framing of this image, I thought that the man crouching down, smoking signified his life being stressful, therefore I converted the image into black and white to portray this.

Image 4: Girl and Slush Puppy - The shallow depth of field on this image, creates the girl to be the focal point. I wanted to capture the colours in the slush puppy to signify the simplicity of ice and colouring used to mkae this product, showing it's relevance to the convenience of fast food.

Image 5: Chinese fast food - To compare with the image of the chinese man smoking next to his stall, I also took a photo of him working. Above the stall, you can see a selection of the food they were producing, however this image only shows a small portion of the meals, even though it shows about 20 meals. From this, I wanted the viewer to realise that the quantity of food can't be produced to high quality standards.

Image 6: Food Advertisment - This image shows the advertisement of a stall within the market. Its deep depth of field, makes the poster stand out, and the writing and products are in strong focus. From this image, I wanted to show how cheap these products were selling for, signifying the type of social class they were advertising too. I increased the contrast of this image because I wanted the colours in the food to make an impact on the viewers opinion on the food themselves.

Image 7: Slush Puppy machines - Once again, I took this image to match with the one of the girl sitting down with her drink. I wanted to show the intenstiy of the choice of drinks. This image makes food seem more of a game then something we actually need.

Image 8:  Burger Van - This image was taken to show how popular the burger vans were. I wanted a deep depth of field to make the image look busy which would also represent the popularity of the van.

Image 9: People Eating - As I had taken many photos of the burger vans themselves, I wanted to represent the type of social class associated with the cheap, fast food being produced.

Image 10: Hog Roast Van - This type of fast food van was a hog roast van, which was different to many of the others. I had noticed that the food had been left out on the front of the van with hardly any supervision. I found this disgusting, therefore I wanted to show the audience this.

Image 11: To expand on the amount of food being consumed, I captured another image of people eating. And once again, it was fast food. This image also represents the social class concept within my photo essay.

Image 12: For my final image, I wanted to include everything I had capturred so far. I wanted to show the cheap prices of the food, expressing the lack of quality in them, as well as showing the popularity in fast food.

Example of RAW Editing 

The image on the left was the original RAW photo I took of a man round the back of his Chinese food stall having a cigarette. Because the man was quite far away, I had to have my lens on full zoom, yet I still wasn't closer then i had hoped. I was interested by the concept behind this photo, becuase the man looked very untidy and dirty, even though he was cooking food in the tent next to him. His apron was very old with holes in it, and food had been splattered all down the front. He was wearing no gloves and even though he was wearing a hat, it was once again very old. When editing this photo, I wanted to represent how i was feeling when i captured the moment. I felt at unease, and disgusted by what I saw, therefore I changed the photo into Grey scale to create a duller, unhappier theme and increased the contrast by 15% to make the colours stand out and juxtapose against eachother. I also used lens vignetting to create a stronger focal point on the man.  

    For my photo essay, I chose to go to Blackbushe Market. I decided to go here because I thought that it's a interesting place to experience different cultures, and with Christmas coming soon, it would be very busy. Therefore, I would have lots of options and chances to take photos on showing the theme of my photos, culture and society.

However, as soon as I got there, I found out that no one was willing to have their photo's of themselves or their stalls taken. This became a major problem and I had to change my theme very quickly. I still wanted to base my theme around culture and society, and looking around the market I was surrounded by burger vans and people eating. I then noticed how cheap the food was going for, and taking into consideration about the financial climate the world is in at the moment, I thought this would make a great photo essay showing how peoples lives are having to change because of society as a whole.

   Yet I still had the problem of people not wanting to have their photo taken, therefore I had to spontaneously and quickly take a photo when I saw something worth while and that would help portray my theme, and if the person was in my shot at the time, I wouldn't need consent. I experimented using the Av, Tv and A-dep settings on the camera to see which setting worked best. The weather on the day was incredibly dull so I ended up shooting most of my photos on ISO 800 and at 1/1000 of a second as I wanted to capture a precise momement of reality.

When editing my photos, I wanted to use the techniques Magnum photographers had used in that past, as well as editing them in my own way. For example, when editing the greyscale photo of the Chinese chef smoking, I decreased the lens vignetting to -81 as I wanted to darken the edges to draw the focal point towards the man. Also, like magnum photographers, I increased the noise reduction to +60 to decrease the pixels, because of how far away my photos were and how gloomy the weather was, some of my photos came out slightly grainy. On other photos, for example, all of the photos of the food vans, I increased the contrast by 10% because I really wanted the colours to stand out to connote the happy atmosphere that was consistant throughout the market.

When looking back at my photos, they represent political reflexivity as well as using the poetic mode to represent fragments of society. From this shoot, I have learnt to be prepared with a back up plan incase my primary plan went wrong. I have also learnt that it's best to take as many photos as you can, and then to upload them on location to see your images on a bigger scale to pick out the dis-advantages, as I had to go back again to get higher quality photos.