Person at Work Shoot 1: Gavin V Thorpe

 

After researching contacts and the work of various photojournalists, I decided that for my own subject matter I would first see what shots of employees I could get while on our three day Eden   Project residential trip. The fact that we would have access to staff there presented a great opportunity that I really wanted to take advantage of, and it allowed me to learn a lot more about such an interesting, varied place. 

The first employee I decided to photograph at Eden was a hospitality worker, who was working on the Baobab & Rum Bar in the Rainforest Biome, called Gavin V Thorpe. I used the knowledge that I have gathered so far in my modules to communicate well with my subject and gain rapport with him in a professional way, in order for him to be comfortable while working to get more natural shots of him.  The nature of the small shack meant he was difficult to photograph in terms of framing and also working around customers in order to just or mostly get my worker in the frame. Because of this I don't think these shots are particularly successful and as I cannot go and reshoot them I will not be using this subject for my final images for this project. 

One mistake I think I made in this first shoot was not spending more time with my subject. As I was only there for ten minutes and if I had waited longer I think he would have been even more comfortable with me taking shots of him and also would have given me more to photograph in terms of what he was doing. 

I think I also need to establish what kinds of shots I should be trying to get in order to build my set of three images. As I think I focused a little too much on getting detail shots in this shoot which I feel should only be one image out of my three ideally, in order to see more of the subject themselves. In order to resolve this I plan on looking at series of photographs that show people at work, to observe what kinds of images work well when put together in a set.