Henri Cartier-Bresson was a french photographer born into a wealthy family, Henri first took snapshots on holiday with a Box Brownie; he then later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was very indulgent with the idea of a decisive moment, this idea being that the moment the photo is taken is a key aspect of a photo. This can usually be seen through street photography, the photograph being genuine and real, not set up and fake. By not interfering with his surroundings, it gives him a raw realistic ideal of what his photos portray.
However he also works closely with composition, in his case this has become a well tuned skill he has developed over years of experience, but he still has to set the composition of his photo very specifically as we all do before he takes the photo. This use of composition really helps the photo move further from average street photography, combining with the decisiveness of his photos to give an amazing result. |
I personally really enjoyed this task, I found it incredibly interesting to work with the idea of a decisive moment, street photography is one of my favourite types of photography, especially of people. However I did still find this task quite difficult, people, no matter how good the potential photo may look, don't always like their photo being taken, as well as this, being in school didn't give a huge array of photo opportunities. Over all I did enjoy looking at his work and taking inspiration, if I was to do it again I think I would shoot on film, as you get a beautiful filter over black and white film photography, you can see this in Bresson's work.
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These three images are three of my most successful I believe, this being because you can see that they aren't positioned or planned, they are genuine moments that happened that I was able to capture. For example you can see in the bottom image the boys on the right hand side of the image reading the books look like they are smiling, thats genuine expression I was able to capture.
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Nick Waplington is a British artist and photographer based in New York City. As a child Waplington traveled a lot as because of his fathers work, and studied art in West Sussex college of art and design. He first started taking photos when he would regularly vie his grandfather, photographic his surroundings, his main focus being his family and friends, continuing for years to release numerous books and open exhibitions of his work.
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In comparison to the Henri Cartier-Bresson, I found this far more difficult, mainly for the reson of the resourses for the photos, this being in school, whilst most lessons are taking place, because of this I couldn't quite recreate the style of photo that Nick Walpington has. I do really like his style of photo, but I do also think that in Bressons work, he focuses on composition far more then Walpington, some of his photos looking as if anybody could have taken them.
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