Last Assignment

For the last part of my last Assignment I have been studying other peoples photographs to try and generate a few ideas. So far I have covered street vendors, night scenes, tuk tuks, klong buildings and I've nearly finished selecting my choice of temple images also for this last assignment. The very last part I left open so I could judge how everything was fitting together before deciding on how the whole set should be rounded off.

After some recent reading of On Photography by Susan Sontag and Women by Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag, I'm drawn more and more to making a small set of ordinary people from Bangkok to finish off the collection.

A useful source of inspiration to me has been a Flickr Group called "Bangkok Street" that has some great street photographers making regular contributions. One of them is called Terrosa, and I've posted three of his recent images below. I can see that he's a real street hunter and when he finds his target he nails it perfectly. Most of his work is in b&w, but would work equally well in colour.

This first image by Terrosa shows a man sitting on a dirty street massaging his fighting cock. Despite being comfortable with the surrounding, he has taken the precaution of wearing a face mask. Perhaps it was taken during a period of bird flu.





In this next image by Terrosa, of a barber shop, I like the angle he has taken the photo from and the way the reflection takes the eye back and forth diagonally.





This third image has been taken on a train and almost looks staged. Not only has he managed to capture the interesting scene on the right, he has balanced the photo with the dark clothed man on the left.





As there are some holidays coming up I plan to hit the streets to find what I'm looking for. I'll be taking a Nikon D3s so I can continue to photograph well into the night without extra lighting. Attached to the camera will be a 17-35mm VR lens as I believe this will be best suited to quick action close up street action. As with my last submissions I want to show a common sight in Bangkok, but taken in a way that doesn't look like a picture book, postcard or average tourist snapshot. I want a part of real life!