NOCN digital photography course - week 2

This week was all about taking in our ‘home work’…it feels weird calling it that; home work was something I used to forget to do or drop in a puddle or something!

We were asked to look for a portrait we liked by a well known photographer and that had a style that appealed to us.

I felt extremely green to all this as I don’t know any photographers, only friends and acquaintances!

But after a lot of clicking around on the internet I settled on a photo called “Ditched, Stalled, Stranded” by Dorothea Lange.
“Dorothea Lange was a natural photographer in the truest sense because she lived, in her words, "a visual life." She could look at something: a line of laundry flapping in the wind, a pair of old, wrinkled, work-worn hands, a bread-line, a crowd of people in a bus station, and find it beautiful. Her eye was a camera lens and her camera--as she put it--an "appendage of the body." During her last illness, as a friend sat near her bed, she suddenly said to him "I've just photographed you." Lange had engaged in this camera-less sort of photography for decades, from the time she was a young girl, and it served as both the foundation of her art education and her first apprenticeship.”
(Taken from “ARTIST HERO: DOROTHEA LANGE” by Susannah Abbey)

She had been overtaken by her love for photography and seemed to mentally frame all she looked at and although she made a living from photographing the wealthy, she loved capturing basic life in a candid way, making images of real moments almost making it appear that her subjects were completely unaware she was holding a camera while they looked her way.

I can empathise with her at times, as I too feel that I am constantly framing things and almost taking shots without the camera. I now carry a camera with me nearly all the time so that I don’t have to wish I’d had one!
Ditched, Stalled, Stranded - Dorothea Lange


I much prefer a portrait that has a more documentary feel to it than an obviously staged image.

We showed our findings to the rest of the group which sparked off some great comments.
There was work there by Lord Snowden and David Bailey amongst others.

This brought us up to a break and we all disappeared to the canteen for a plastic cup full of a generic hot drink! I’m not sure what it is from that machine you know, I reckon that no matter what you pick it will taste the same. Coffee, tea, anything! After that we were asked to get in to 2’s or 3’s and take portraits of each other using a set guide as follows;

1. Full body shot
2. ¾ body shot
3. ½ body shot
4. head and shoulders
5. full head
6. close up (part of the face)

Now the idea was to make a series of photos inside and out but it was raining pretty hard so we decided inside was fine!
I didn’t feel as if we had much time and so we sort of rushed about trying to do our best I’d seen a few great spots as we had our drinks in the canteen early and wanted to shoot some stuff in there so we dashed over. Natasha, Ian and I buzzed around the room trying our best; I was shooting mainly in auto just to get something on the card!
As usual the best stuff seemed to happen as we walked back and snapped other people in there groups.