Looking at this years images, it seems to me, I have started to develop a hole in my style.
By this, I literally mean a hole.
I think video has helped me identify it, but at the end of the day, reviewing recent work has shown the issue out plainly and clearly.
I currently shoot wide, wider than I have previously, mostly for establishing or context shots, then switch to close detail/portrait style to champion individual people or achievement.
My favoured shooting style for street photography and to be honest my personal photographic holy grail, is juggling multiple elements in the middle distance. The work of Sam Abell, Daniel Cox, Jan Meissner, most of the documentary style Nat Geo shooters past and present and the early street masters like Haas, Herzog and Leiter were all experts at layering their images with context and meaning, all in their immediate vicinity.
Concentrating on details is a portraitist or sports shooters method of operation and wide shots are the landscapers stock in trade that I am using more and more. My missing element (in more ways than just this) is developing my street “eye”.
Does this mean I have let my most powerful, treasured, but not yet perfected tool go blunt? Am I regressing to older and almost forgotten techniques at the expense of my favoured one, the very one I spent over ten years obsessed with?
Single layered, but full of interaction.
For me, to get this ideal across I need to use depth as well as width to compose and let my viewer follow their own story in a three dimensional way. Shooting long and shallow compresses and overtly defines, shooting wide often defines nothing.
My intention is to hide, often in plain sight, elements of context and mystery for the viewer to discover and tell their own story from. To my way of thinking, this is the pinnacle of visual story telling, YMMV. If an image has three revelatory moments, I feel I have succeeded.
Is this a problem and do I need to fix it in this context? Work seem happy, but I regularly feel like I have “missed a trick”.
One thing that has helped disguise this habit, so possibly highlights my own lack of awareness, is that when I do submit a file with some story telling density, it is more often than not featured in the half dozen or so shots the school posts on its website, facebook etc, often chosen out of thirty odd submitted images, so other people are reacting to them.
Video will likely fix this habit for me anyway. The reality is, wide and long shots are nowhere near as common in video as middle ground shots are, so concentrating on video, especially storyboarding , which likely helped me stop this habit forming further. It may cure me and make me a better photographer generally.
Depth is the key.