Treatment
Original and creative ways to shoot prosaic subjects
It’s not a bad idea to research what others are doing in any particular creative area that interests you
With a word as wide-ranging as this, you can expect any number of ways of shooting, from using a particular focal length of lens to ways of composing to kinds of lighting. Anything, in fact, to do with style, and it’s such a broad term that many people assume that all creativity operates within this area. As we’ve just seen, however, how you choose to define the subject can also be creative, and as we’ll see in the following pages, there’s also the specially photographic creativity that plays with the surface layer of an image.
The classic idea here is that the subject is locked in place and your creative effort goes into a fresh, unexpected way of shooting it. This is perfectly suited to situations in which the subject is not only a given, but has perhaps been worked to death over the years for being so obvious or photogenic. At times, this could read like a textbook exercise: “Choose one of the following icons – the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Brooklyn Bridge – and photograph it in a way that no one has before.” Those are maybe extreme examples, but the broader view is the challenge of taking the familiar and twisting it, and it has worked throughout the arts, whether a composer like Aaron Copland taking early American folk melodies and turning them into orchestral pieces, or Van Gogh doing his bit with sunflowers and cornfields. If we keep to a city theme with city icons, there are many examples of photographers working on their own distinctive versions, all easy to research on the Internet, from the famous – Robert Frank’s grey fog-shrouded London in the 1950s – to recent and largely unknown – Giacomo Brunelli in his Eternal
London (2012-2014) series. Both of these are black and white, noir-ish in different ways, but make an interesting comparison. Anyway, I’m not making this into a history lesson, but it’s not a bad idea to research what others are doing in any particular creative area that interests you.
Find a fresh perspective
My particular example is also a city icon, in Tokyo – Shibuya Crossing. Always presented as the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing (though I don’t know if there’s ever been an official survey), on a busy day up to 2,500 people cross at one time. From all directions, so it’s called a scramble crossing, though this being orderly Japan there’s no scrambling, pushing or jostling.
So it’s very well-known, with a huge screen featuring waking brontosauruses and the like (featured in Lost in
Translation), and as my hotel overlooked it, impossible to ignore. Street level is one possibility, in among the thick of things. Another is a mid-level shot from one of the surrounding walkways, but yet another, given that I was in a 14-storey hotel, was a plan view from above. The problem with plan views, like from drones, is that they’re rather distanced, and as the Google Earth view shows, not particularly exciting. People as ants – well, that’s been done before. Added to this was that the hotel windows, typically Japanese, didn’t open, although they were kept clean. On an acute downward angle, that added some distortion. In other words, it wasn’t looking good conventionally… until, one rainy day I happened to glance down and saw a very different image, like a colourful game board, perhaps an unusually complex game of go. The intervening falling rain and the distortion from the glass actually contributed to the lack of realism, as did a telephoto. In terms of sales and usage, it’s remained a popular image.