Long Exposure Test Shoot

After looking at Alexey Titarenko's work I have become inspired to try a completely different technique to those I was using at the start of my project on the housing problem. 

Titarenko's technique was to use long exposure times to add large amounts of movement to his pictures, which were meant to represent the Soviet oppression on their public. 

I think this same technique can be used to the same affect when looking at a homeless subject, because they are almost like forgotten people and many people do just believe they are eye saws and nothing else. 

Before going back to either the Piccadilly or Oxford road camp, to start photographing the community of people using this new technique, I wanted to practice it to make sure I would mess it up when it counted. 

To do this I went to a busy place in Manchester town centre and put my camera on a tripod with a wide angle lens attached to it. The reason for the tripod, was so that I wouldn't blur the fore or background and only the people walking passed would look in motion. I also used a wide angle lens because I think this would work well when photographing the homeless communities, because it will allow me to get close to the subjects while still capturing the general camp, which should make the viewer feel very involved within the frame. 

I tried this technique in a few different locations, but this composure gave me the best looking results from my tests. What I wanted to test was how slow of a shutter speed I should set my camera to, to see what amounts of visual information was recorded on the subject and what amounts were just blur. 

I also decided to set the camera to f/22 so I would get the most detail from the fore and background as possible, which I believe Titarenko's images show. 

0.5 seconds 

0.8 seconds

1 second

2.5 seconds

5 seconds

As you can see, from this test the best results are between the exposure time of 0.5-1 second, because you still get a sense of what the subject looks like without actually seeing any defining features, which is the look I want to go for when I try this again at the homeless camps. I think 2.5 and 5 seconds just showed too much movement and not enough detail in the image.

One thing I need to keep in mind is when I do this technique properly is that the amount of blur depends entirely on how much the subject is moving, the less movement the less blur. To counter this I will need to decrease the shutter speed, while keeping the f/stop the same to keep the high levels of focus and detail on the surrounding objects.