Contact Sheet 1

For my first set of images, I decided to shoot   late into the afternoon. I mentioned before, I wanted to target busy environments to capture the blurred movement of the crowds. These pictures where taken at the ice rink in Pavillion Gardens. The reason I was drawn to this location, was the fact that I could get people coming from all directions as they skated past the camera. It also reminded me of the murmuration of starlings that Rinko Kawauchi had photographed, so I was tempted to apply this idea of tracing the action of the skaters as a way emphasize the flow of energy.

Overall I felt that  the shoot went relatively well. I was shooting on a slow shutter speed to enhance the blur and without a tripod in my possesion I had to revert to  perching my camera at the edge of rink, this didn't prove too much of a problem in this instance as I wasn't intending to achieve perfect shots and was open to imperfections occuring. I was soley shooting in Tv Mode so I had full control over the shutter speed  whilst my  camera dealt with the aperture settings. The shutter speeds varied quite significantly. I inintailly dialed  1/30 as I thought given the momentum that skaters were travelling at, would of been efficent enough to blur the movement yet still capture the ghostly outlines of their presence. However this was not the case as not everyone was travelling at the same speed, therefore those who were skating at a slower pace were still very visible in the images. I started gradually increasing the exposure by a stop, finally settling on 1/4 which proved to give results that I specfically desired. The only flaw that I experienced was the time it took for the crowd to gather in a big enough pack, which I is what on was primarily relying  on. Obviously I didn't have any control over the way people were moving, therefore I had to wait for a crowd to form, and even when this did happen it was shortlived so that meant I had to perserve enough variety of shots.