Social Documentary - Photographing The Memorial

The Memorial that I wished to take a picture of is set in a corner of the main square.  My intention was to do a slow shutter speed with An stood in the foreground.  This was a challenging task for the following reasons:

• To get a slow shutter speed and catch the movement of people I needed:
• Low light conditions therefore it had to be shot either very early or very late in the day. 
• I needed people to walk past to generate the movement, they were surprisingly considerate when they did go by and tried to avoid the camera!
• I wanted to get An in the foreground and make some impact on the picture.
• I had to frame it so that there was no distractions such as lamp posts or other things.
• I had to avoid harsh shadows as this would result in under or over exposure of the shot.
• My lens was limited to F22 at its shortest focal length and therefore I had to think of other techniques to deal with the light.

I took the pictures at around 08.53 which is not a great time but then I needed people too and thankfully there was a market which opened at 08.30.  The light meter indicated that I would need F29 for a correct exposure in the shade, this was 2/3rds less than my lens would allow.  There was also a bright sunlit part of the memorial which was changing as clouds went by.  I could not meter for this and so that part could well be over exposed.

The solutions I used were:

• I set up the camera across the street on the tripod.
• I used my remote trigger to take the picture, avoiding camera shake.
• I set the ISO to 100 to make the camera less sensitive to light, although this would not have a great impact.
• I fixed a Neutral Density filter to my camera.  This is a piece of glass that is tinted to reduce the amount of light entering the camera.  In this case is was an ND8 which is supposed to take 3 F-stops of light out.  This would mean that I should be able to drop from F29 to F14.  After taking some test shots I dropped to F8 almost 4 stops down.  The main reason was to try and balance between the shadow and the brightly lit areas.
• I could have adjusted the ISO back up to 200 if I needed more depth of field (more of the picture in focus), this would have allowed me to close the F-stop to 11 if required. 

Now it was a question of catching a few people as they went by.  There were a number of shots taken to try and get the right picture.  The final shot we took was pretty much the one I wanted, see below:

Problems with this image:

• The framing is not great, with the tree and the orange pole.
• An is too small in the foreground.
• There is a crane I don't like in the background.
• The memorial itself is a little too small for my liking.
• The red post box on the left is distracting too.

I turned to Photoshop for the solutions and did the following changes:

• I did adjust the light as it was a little too dark and as it happened a cloud managed to take the shadows away at just the right time.  You can still see the cast of the memorial on the wall but I was ok with this.
• I selected An and cut and paste her into a new layer in Photoshop.  This was a fiddly job to do.
• I then enlarged An to fill more of the foreground.
• I cropped as much as I could to take out the orange pole and the other distractions.
• I then created another layer to mask the rest of the orange pole at the top of the image.  I did this by cutting and pasting a section of the wall into a new layer and then sliding it into place to cover the orange pole.
• I then selected the crane, in two parts into their own layers and then erased it.
• For effect I thought it would have more of an impact if An appeared ghostly and thus I selected the layer that she was on and used the eraser tool set at 18% opacity resulting in the picture as it is.
• I then flattened the layers onto one image and then cleaned up by applying a stroke black line border and then by re-sizing the canvas to make a border.

The finished image is below:

It was a lot of work and if you look closely you may well be able to see where I have made my adjustments, but then it was a learning experience.  It is the first time I have used my neutral density filters since buying them almost 8 years ago!  Also I learnt an awful lot by padding my way through Photoshop. I do need to go back and take a picture of Arthur's name, which appears on the left hand side of the memorial.  I will be using another Photoshop technique which I discovered recently, allowing you to pick a spotlight and position it onto the photograph.

I never used to believe in post photo editing but then in some cases you can achieve a dramatic effect by using the software that is impossible in the camera.  Also it clearly managed to save my image from the rather bog standard shot that I began with.