Assignment (Unit 101-105) - WWII Shoot - Review

After giving myself time to think about my adventures in the woods I feel that I was a little hard on myself for the way my images turned out.  Sure, I had problems with the sharpness of some of the images, but on the whole I feel that I have more than enough photographs to submit for my final body of work.

Not having the funds to purchase the most fantastic DSLR's available, all my shots were captured by my trusty Sony A200.  A camera which is fairly decent as an entry level camera but one which may need to be upgraded if I want to become a serious photographer.

Most of my shots were taken using my Sony DT 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 lens which seemed to be more effective.  I wanted to try and get up close and personal and this lens was a lot better at achieving this. The wider aperture of the standard lens meant my Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO DG MACRO lens spent most of its time sitting in my backpack.  The Sigma did pop out for some of my long shots.

Now a word from our health and safety advisor.

Being in the woods, with deadly weapons and lots of camera equipment requires careful planning.  Firstly, the frozen ground was an issue.  My German pal fell on his backside to the amusement of myself and my American friend and this was a constant threat.  What can you do about the weather?  We just had to make sure we took care and tried not to walk on the really icy paths.

My friend Dave (The American) is a native of the woods which was partly the reason we chose Baddersley. I don't mean he's a hermit who actually lives in the woods or anything, I mean he's a local lad and spent most of his childhood running about in said woods.  We knew where we were going and we had our trusty WW2 era mobile phones at hand in case anyone got lost.

As far as the weapons were concerned, the bayonet stayed in its sheath until needed as did the rifle.  The rifle itself was unloaded (we had no ammunition to tempt us) and the safety was left on at all times.

To avoid the threat of having the police intervene, we made sure to put the weapons away whenever civilians walked past (luckily, this only happened once or twice).

The only other consideration we took was adopting a "common sense is self defence" mentality.

Back to the shoot...

When I set out to shoot these images I made a conscious choice to use only natural light.  I figured that back in the battlefields of the 1940's photographers would have had little opportunity to arrange the perfect lighting setup.  At least I had the time to move my subjects into the required position.

f/25 1/3 sec ISO-400

Being in the middle of the woods meant that the light was broken up by the canopy and quite often I managed to position my subjects so the lighting highlighted parts that I wanted to be the main focal point.  For instance, in the above shot I wanted my German soldier as the main focal point.  I then wanted the view to be drawn across to see what he's aiming at.  I then used the sunlight to make my American soldier poke out of the woods.  I was quite happy with how this shot turned out.  It was one of five in a series before the light disappeared under the clouds.  I used a narrow aperture to try and keep the background in focus.

f/5.6 1/40sec ISO-400

In my shot of the German soldier surrendering I positioned my 'actors' so that the light would be shining on the face of the German.  I wanted my two characters to stand out as the whole act of surrender was the theme of the picture.  This was another shot that took a lot of tinkering with.  Positioning the people into exactly the right places took a lot of time but I was rewarded with some nice shots.  At this time I was getting into the mentality of shooting as many images as I could until the conditions had changed.  I took this photograph in landscape and portrait and decided that the portrait version just seemed tidier and on the whole, it just worked nicely.

Upon entering the woods I had a clear idea of the shot's I wanted but I was also willing to let things flow and see what happened.  As I ventured deeper into the woods I found some great places to stage photographs and this affected the overall outcome.  Shot's which worked well in my head didn't work with certain surroundings and figuring out how best to re-compose things was a challenge which I really enjoyed.

f/5.6 1/40sec ISO-800

After arranging my final set piece of the German attack on the American soldier, I decided to shoot from a variety of different angles to see what effect it had on the overall scene.  The above shot shows very little detail of the aftermath of the attack but that's what I like about it.  By focusing on the helmet I managed to slightly blur out the dead guy's head.  Below is the more revealing shot which (yes I have already posted on a previous blog) was one of my favourites of the day.  I waited patiently to catch the sunlight breaking through the trees.

All that's left to do for this part of my assignment is to whittle down my photographs so I have at least six to ten strong images.  I will be looking for images that show good composition, lighting and quality.  Ideally, I would like to tell a picture story with my images that will continue onto my manipulation assignment.