Shoot an abstract image of the local built environment
Challenge 2 Chloé Brown
Fast fashion photography requires quick thinking and quick feet, so we thought we’d slow things down with an abstract round. Relatively newly built, our shooting environment offered a range of visual interest through its architecture and street furniture, so we were keen to see what our participants could come up with.
“For my abstract shots, I was looking for leading lines and symmetry,” says Chloé. “Here, I used a deeper depth of field to show the details of the wood from the planter.”
Expert opinion
Good use of leading lines here by Chloé – not just vertically to take you into the image, but also horizontally. This keeps the viewer engaged for just a few seconds more. The texture in this photo could be bumped up a little during editing, to create an image with a little more contrast.
Challenge 2
Gabriela Straczynska
Perhaps keeping faith with the human aspect of the fashion shot round, most of the abstract images Gabriela took for this challenge also featured people. She uses them as elements of the urban landscape, though, to add a sense of scale and context, rather than just being subjects in documentary-driven street shots.
For this shot of a pedestrian promenading in front of a lakeside eaterie, Gabriela has opted to shoot from ground level, using the flip-up rear display on her Sony Alpha 7 III. As well as producing an interesting angle for the viewer, this strategy playfully inverts the conventions of street photography, where practitioners tend to shoot surreptitiously at waist or upper-body height.
“I wanted to showcase how we blend in with our surroundings,” Gabriela says. “So I decided not to make my subject – the legs and feet – stand out too much, but instead mix in a bit with the background. I therefore decreased all the red, yellow and magenta tones, as well as reducing the orange and boosting the midtones using a Tone Curve.”
Expert opinion
A low position will always give you a blurry foreground. Gabriela has chosen to push it further by focusing on the background rather than the moving subject. Top tip: if you want to capture the feet in focus, use manual focus and set it to the distance in feet (or metres) of how far away you think they will be, then let them walk into frame.