When walking under a bridge on the Oxford Road I saw Aaron, who I had previously photographed at the Oxford Road camp before they'd been kicked out, who was sat begging under the bridge. After speaking to him for a while it turns out that over the month of December he had been sent back to prison due to missing is parole date which he had to attend every week. This was quite interesting because he said that the prison system didn't try to get him into housing but they insisted that he had to see his parole officer every week, even when he's sleeping rough on the streets with no way to tell the time.
After leaving prison after a month, he's back to sleeping rough on the streets again but seen as the Oxford road camp has been evicted, he's having to sleep in a two man tent by the side of the road next to the nearest bridge to the Oxford Road train station.
I took this opportunity to start my new idea which was influenced by Jacob Riis' photographs to document how different homeless people were living, using my wide angle lens on a tripod, while my camera is set to f/22 to make sure nearly everything is in focus. I first tried this technique when looking into the work of Alexey Titarenko, which I did a practice shoot to test the new technique. So with Aaron's permission I started photographing the tent that he was living in at the moment.
I think the tones of these images are really moody due to having a dark blue cast over the inside of the tent. The problem with this image is that I tried to focus too much on the front of the tent and the image doesn't show the back enough which means without explanation the viewer wouldn't be able to tell exactly what they were looking at.
This image definitely works better in showing the viewer more of the inside of the tent, so they can see exactly what conditions Aaron is living in, including old fags ends, an old sleeping bag and a few possessions.
For this image I tilted the tripod downwards so that the composition included more of the bottom of the tent and less of the top. I think in some regards I prefer this image because it gives the viewer more visual information to look at such as the empty sandwich wrappers, but I feel they don't get a full sense of the space or lack of space due to this cramped composition.
This photo I believe gives the viewer a stronger feeling of what it might be like to live in this tent, because composition makes you feel like your enclosed within the tent instead of on the outside looking in. This is the sort of effect that I wanted to show through this set of images, although I wish that there was more visual information in the form of objects that the viewer could focus on over time. But I think the lack of objects in the tent and the bleak blue colour makes this image look lonely and cold.
From this shoot I have learnt that the best composition to use is one that shows both the top half of the tent and bottom half evenly, while making sure that the camera is inside the tent to that the viewer feels like they are enclosed within the space. This should make them feel like they are directly inside this tent 'home' and experiencing what it may be like to live inside something so small. What I really like about these images is the blue lighting which casts a cold and lonely light over Aaron's belongings, this works well in explaining what it might feel like to live inside a tent. Aaron said that he cant keep many belongings inside the tent because people will try to steal anything valuable inside the tent while he's out.
After this shoot, I know that the techniques I used to take these photographs do work. The tripod is necessary because the tents are very dark inside, and also with the camera set to f/22 it means that hardly any light gets into the lens which together means that I need long exposures to expose the images correctly. I also set my ISO to 100, which is as low as possible so it means these images have very little noise or blur and as much detail as possible.
I am definitely going to carry on this technique throughout my project, because it works very well to put the viewer inside some homeless peoples lives.