Exercise - shooting from the hip

I chose Leysdown, a seaside town in Kent, that seems to attract a large number of Londoners for my shooting from the hip exercise. I'm not quite sure what the attraction is for so many Londoners to this place but it is very popular and compared to some south coast towns it is bustling with people and energy. I looked at the course notes for this exercise and followed some of the advice in the web links - mainly to take care and not appear too obvious. I wasn't going to be putting my camera in anybody's faces like Martin Parr or Gary Winogrand.

One useful tip was to put my camera on a strap and use the interval timer to take surreptitious photos. That was definitely more me. I set the camera to quiet mode too which stopped the tell-tale focus beep from going off. As it happens the biggest problem was hearing the shutter going off on the crowded town streets. I could turn and point the camera, strung sideways across my body, to point at interesting people or situations but I had no idea if the shutter was due to fire in the 40 second intervals selected. I overcame this by taking out my phone and using its stopwatch feature. Every 40 seconds or so I prepared to compose a picture and that helped a lot.

This exercise is quite hard to do. The images are all slanted so the camera needs adjusting for the next time I try this exercise. I don't mind that too much but for every image it can get a bit monotonous. I've found that street photography isn't really my thing anymore. I feel I've moved on from it. I did enjoy the exercise but I wasn't entirely comfortable photographing people without their knowledge to be honest. There are certain shots that I've left out because of this. A shot of a bare chested, overweight man with his dog, springs to mind.

I think the images are fairly honest. I have gone for an edit that shows colour and pattern by focusing on the slightly gaudy seaside surroundings. I can see that using this technique on multiple trips to the same location could be quite rewarding in terms of achieving a coherent photo-set for a project. It feels a bit like 'fishing' though? Going back again and again to capture compositions to fit a sequence is not something that particularly interests me. That is probably why I have moved more towards constructed imagery in my own work.