Assignment 2: People & Activity (reflection)

One of the main points of concern for my tutor was my technical understanding in shooting the London Marathon. As I knew I would need to vary the shutter speed quite frequently and sometimes at a moment’s notice, I set the camera to shutter priority, leaving the camera to work on the correct aperture and iso to expose correctly. In hindsight, setting the iso myself would have given me back a little more control. I always shoot in RAW to allow for more scope in correction.

As I switched between slower shutter speeds for panning and faster for freezing the action, I did make a few errors, resulting in some shots not being as sharp as I would have liked. This lead to difficulties in selecting images for this assignment as my main aim for this set was to create a set of images which give a real sense of how it feels to be a runner or a spectator in such a challenging, yet celebrated event.

One particular image pointed out by my tutor was my final image, the one which for me, sums up what the marathon is about. The centre runner with a shaved head which we all know to be associated with cancer runs, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan ‘Cancer, we’re coming to get you!’. At either side of her, two other runners also wear pink t-shirts, symbolising a solidarity and togetherness that is brought about by such an event; the image however, is not technically perfect. Knowing this fact, I still felt that the image should complete my set as it was essentially the backbone of everything I wanted to get across in this assignment. I have since worked on this image in Photoshop  to work towards making it appear sharper. This has been time consuming but not as difficult as I would have anticipated.

At the time of writing this assignment, I had struggled to find sports photographers that really fit with what I was aiming to create. My preparatory research led to sports photographers such as Bill Frakes, Neil Leifer and SteveBonini. I was struck by Frakes’ ability to show depth and character in his images. Leifer has also captured some inspirational moments in sporting history, however I was uninspired in this instance by the ‘set up’ nature of Bonini’s images. I have since broadened my search to lesser known sportingevents, bringing forward some of the grit, brutality and emotion I was looking for. I will include some of this research in the rework of my assignment.