Documentary

Documentary

Definition

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life.


Image Bank

Henri Cartier Bresson

 
Henri Cartier Bresson was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. Decisive moment is when a photographer takes an image at a particular moment to show meaning and presentation in their final image (not just a random shot). 

The decisive moment:

"the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression."
There was a single instant in which the meaning of an event was most clearly represented graphically. It was the responsibility of the photographer to capture that representation.

 Denotation: the guys running across the image, the decisive moment of this image is that the guy is suspended in the air. The image is in black and white and taken on a miserable raining day.                                     Connotation: The guy is leaping across to avoid getting wet, you can also infer that the guy is in a rush as he is running. 

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange's photographs humanised the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

Contact Sheets

Best Images

Images that need improvement 

AO3: Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions, reflecting critically on work and progress.

My idea for recording Documentary was to photograph and document a walk which I enjoy to take on a daily basis, alone or with company. I was inspired by my research of Dorothea Lange as her photos represented a lot of emotions by photographing people. I didn't photograph any people however I kept the same mood throughout my shoot by keeping the colour scheme similar and keeping to the same subject, the church and woods. 

My images came out as I expected, however I had to pay particular attention to getting the right exposure settings as it was early in the morning when I did the shoot. For example when photographing the church the sky was a light grey and was quite bright with a high exposure. 

f 5.6      ISO 400     1/30

For the images that didn't come out as I expected I struggled to change my camera settings according to the light exposure, and because some of my images were quite dark my focus wasn't that great either. 

AO2: Explore and select appropriate resources, 

media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops

For this shoot the camera I used was a Nikon D3400. The images were taken at an aperture of around f 4 and f 6 for darker images and the brighter landscapes were f 29. I tried to keep the aperture settings low as of how bright it was outside and to also keep a dark / dull theme throughout my images. I kept the iso at 400 however when going into the woods I had to move it up to 800 because of the poor lighting. 

If I was to do a reshoot, I would go on this walk at a different time of the day and maybe have some friends with me and a dog to have a better variety of images. 

To further improve my Documentary shoot I edited my photos all similar to link them together, they all have a hint of red as the leaves in most the images, when edited, created a lovely red colour. 

The screen grabs above show the final image and the editing process of each. Some images needed more layers, for example exposure or curves, because the image was too dark or just needed to be balanced more with the hue and saturation. 

AO1: Develop ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding.

The artist research was helpful as it helped me understand what  Documentary was in photography as in the begining i did struggle to see what kind of photos I would take for this shoot. My research on Henri and Dorethea helped me focus on the emotion in an image and then split second moments that can represent a whole story. I took a walk that means a lot to me and documented it, even if you can't see human emotions the idea of the church and gravestones represent them instead. 

AO4: Present a personal and meaningful response that realises intentions and, where appropriate, makes connections between visual and other elements.