I have taken inspiration from Ed Templeton for my documentary perspectives project, more specifically his project 'adventures in the nearby far away'. This is a photo story about an odd, unchanged placed named Santa Catalina, Templeton had visited the place many times over the years which is what drew him to create a project about it similar to the thoughts behind my own work.
I have enjoyed this body of work due to the way Templeton gives the viewer a good impression of this place using a variety of scenes, closeups, and portraits. This is something I aim to do in my project to try and broaden my work from just showing people skating, this will help me think more about my composition both for more obscure images but also the more standard 'skate' shot.
The above image shows what appears to be a mother and child walking along a rocky beach next to a beached sail boat, what drew me to this was the feeling of exploration and youthful summers which is synonymous with my project. The image has a strong, diagonal, leading line created by the boat, it splits the frame in two framing the two people on the left as well as separating most of the land from the sea. The image was taken on black and white film with a wide angle lens, judging by how sharp everything is from front to back the image was taken with an aperture of f/8 or higher. There is a slight motion blur in the water telling me the shutter speed was quite slow, although I don't think this adds loads to this image he use of a slow shutter for my images will show the speed and movement of the sport. I like that there is a nice amount of contrast in this image despite only using natural light in this way, I will use a flash to achieve a similar high contrast effect.
I have chosen to look at this next image (above) due to wanting to replicate/ produce a similar image based around my project. The image shows a young boy holding up a fish to the camera, he looks like he is showing off this fish like he has possibly just caught this at the beach. The image was taken in strong natural light creating deep shadows in the background and gives the child a nice amount of separation from it. In addition to this Templeton has created separation in this by using a small aperture around f/2.8-4. My idea for this is to get an image of Eve showing off a new skateboard/ skateboard parts outside the local skate shop, I think this will work well in my project as it reminds me of the joy and excitement of getting any fresh parts from the skate shop.
The third image I looked at from this project has a much simpler composition and idea. It shows a woman led in the sand creating a "sand angel", you see no background or other details in the frame other than the sand surrounding the lady. I like how this image shows a silly little moment that was probably given less than a second thought by the woman yet portrays a happy summers beach day. I think that the combination of the curved lines in the sand against the more straight edge T pose the lady is led in. In my project I want to capture lots of these usually missed silly actions to really show how childish the culture of skateboarding can be.
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