Another from the last shoot

Continuing the theme of experimentation and broadening the scope of what I do, this was an image that came from the same session in Market Place, Huddersfield last week.  Clearly, what happened was that this guy appeared in front of my camera when I was trying to play around with shadow shots using the wide angle lens.  I kept the image, vaguely thinking that I might be able to do something with it.  The original showed almost no detail in his back & head, but with some processing in Lightroom &Photoshop, I produced this result.  It has a dark and sinister feel to it – something threatening about the way he seems to be stalking the people in the shadows; the high contrast between shadow and light; the colour difference between the cold blue grey in his jacket and the warm golden sunlight on the stone; the shadow figures reaching out from him towards the light.

That was never my intention when I was taking these photographs – though I was, to an extent, looking to get whatever I could out of some interesting light in the street.  When Trent Parke took this shot  http://www.in-public.com/TrentParke/image/1497  did he set out to get exactly this?  Or was he just recognising that the combination of low sun and heavy rain would make for interesting light/effects?  And did he need to do some processing afterwards to get the very striking result that he did?  Answers are probably – ‘No’; ‘Yes’; and ‘Yes’, respectively.

This is very different from the type of image I normally take and it makes me feel uncertain.  Is it really me, or am I just playing around for the sake of it?  Do I want to make dark images that might unsettle the viewer?  (I reflect back to the first portrait of Isobel in Assignment One & my tutor’s comparison with Testino.)  But on the other hand, going out into the street and looking for interesting images; pushing the boundaries a little; seeing what ‘emotional’ outcomes there are; letting loose a bit more; all that might be a good thing.