Reconnaissance!

I have been busy looking around Greenwich Borough for potentially interesting places to photograph, as well as determining whether the ideas I already had for the assignment were feasible or as I had imagined. I also brought my camera with me on these occasions and have been rewarded with a few unexpected photographic opportunities while out.

   I have found most of my original ideas to be perfectly reasonable. Also I have been generating many more ideas so I should be able to produce a strong selection of images.

   I have also been researching what is on at Greenwich and looking at other photographers including Thomas Struth. I was hoping to emulate or show my inspiration from the kind of photographs he took for 'Audience' in particular. I thought this was true for a couple of shots I had planned for in particular: the flow of people at Greenwich Market and more intrinsically the people looking around the Painted Hall. The latter place I imagined would have very good potential to show the impressions I had gained from looking at Struth's work such as obviously the sense of awe (on people's faces) at looking at such fascinating art within a building, which the Painted Hall would be in common with. The other sets of photographs by Thomas Struth that I found relevant and useful for this assignment were 'Making time' where the composition always captivated me for each shot and 'Pergamon I-VI' where the scale of the place and the comparitively small people within it made for a striking combination.

   Also the way Thomas Struth managed to convey the crowd as one, even while retaining expression in each photograph, made an impression on me. The reason he managed to achieve this I found was because of his meticulous preparation for each photo as described here: "I am rather considerate and precise in choosing my subjects, very analytical in preparing the photo shoots and extremely sensitive during the shootings."- T. Struth, (2011). I felt the last part of this sentence was something I could also learn from.

   I had already visited the Painted Hall at Greenwich in one of my reconnaissance missions, if you will, and so knew this was a good place to carry out creating a photograph like this; there was a constant flux of people visiting. The second thing that struck me was the scale in some of the shots and again, I felt the Painted Hall would be good for this as the space and paintings were of massive proportions.