It struck me, coming from far too much time absorbing video and movie making terms and techniques, that my street photography process has much in common with the core of movie making, “Mise en Scene”, literally “setting the scene”.
Setting the scene and “blocking” (coordinating the angles and movements of the players within the scene) are the foundatons of film making. Still photography can often be directly linked to this, being a small slice of this taken mid-process and street photography, to me anyway is very much an exemplar of this process.
I realised this on the Melbourne trip when my basic process for street shooting seamlessly merged with my thinking and visualisation for “setting the scene” with video.
Find the space, set the light, place the subject(s) and allow the movement to happen.
Light, camera and action, except that the movement is arrested leaving your mind to play scene out.
Time and again, I found myself composing a still image, that would likely have been better employed as a stage. This also came with the realiseation that I am often composing images without people in them, capturing the stage the actors will enter.
This closes a loop for me, helping me to understand why I like to shoot spaces both empty and occupied. They are effectively the same thing, a stage, empty or “blocked”. It makes no difference to me in any real sesne. People are assumed.
There can be many ugly places in a big city, but thee are many pionts of beauty also.
“This way or that?”
Light in large cities can be very stage like. Reflections can bounce around creating both even and interesting effects. I like living in a large town/small city, but this light, reserved for bigger centres, is addictive.
Breaking the rules is part of the process with mixed results.
More light as an essential element of scene setting.