Close & involved

This exercise I thought was going to be the hardest but it wasn't as bad as I had imagined. In it we are tasked with taking images of people with a wide angle lens close up....not an easy task at first thought.

This I found daunting as there is nowhere to hide and it may be more obvious that your subject is fully aware of you taking pictures of them. What I did not expect though was that in using a wide angle lens you can appear to be taking a picture of a scene and not an individual. I realised this by looking through the view finder knowing what I was going to capture and then looking with my eyes tracking the direction the lens was pointing in. Remarkably most of the subjects would be completely unaware that they would in in shot; this was the most valuable lesson learnt from the day.

The area I chose was a coastal resort with a fair number of people but no madding crowds. I noticed and older gentleman and I thought he was going to use the binaculars, this shot didn't work, though I have shown it below all the same.

My favorite shot from the day shortly followed the older gentleman looking out over a veranda to the ocean. Using the wide angle at 17 mm he had no idea I was taking an image of him. It has caught a pensive moment in time, gazing over the ocean and the wide angle has worked well stretching the sky so that the viewer of the image feels that there are there in the scene.

Sadly, this was by far the best image of the day using this wide angle technique. One last attempt that I will show was of an interesting 'rapper' character who must have been hot in the midday sun, but he stayed staring at the sea for ages....