After basing a test shoot in Trafalgar square and Oxford Circus, I wanted to shoot some images closer to the people within my past images from the environment unit. Up to this point, I was capturing people from a far at a high point of view, which intrigued me, but I wanted to be more engaged with the subjects in my photographs. While planning another shoot based in London, I was approached by ‘Fish Hairstyling’, a renowned salon on Wardour Street. Their ethos is celebrating everything Soho, which gave me the opportunity to shoot a series of street photographs for the environment project and also have my work exhibited in a renowned Soho store.
Deciding to shoot in Soho, I wanted to capture within the photographs the electric feeling which the district holds. Soho’s culture is diverse; it holds endless cultures and nationalities and always seems to have something interesting happening. The drastic juxtaposition from the classy Oxford Street to the quirky back streets which is home to underground nightclubs and sex shops. The range of people that occupy the area is diverse, including businessmen, musicians, celebrities, artists, and socialites. While focusing the images on the streets of Soho, I wanted the main subjects to be the people who really make the district famous.
While on the first test shoot in London, I found shooting on film to be limiting as you are restricted to 36 exposures (35mm) and I found that having to stick to one ISO setting was restricting my workflow while on the streets. I wanted to be able to shoot a burst of photos to never miss a moment, while mixing up ISO settings to get faster exposures, which made me choose to shoot with a Canon 5D MKIII as I could shoot hundreds of images and not have the drawback of constantly outing new film ion the camera. Due to having only exclusively shot with a 50mm prime lens in the past within my projects, I decided that I wanted to use this focal length in the Soho shoot. I find that with a 50mm lens, you have to get closer to the subject, often creating a more interesting reaction than if you were to just shoot images from further away with a zoom lens. 50mm prime lenses usually come in f/1.8 as its widest aperture, but as I was shooting on a cloudy autumn day, I decided that using a 50mm f/1.4 would be the best option and would give me the option of shooting in some lower light conditions. Although I didn’t shoot with the aperture set to f/1.4 as I wanted a larger depth of field, I did like having the option of the wide aperture just in case I needed it. For most of the images, I wanted a fast shutter speed but didn’t want to compromise having a wide aperture, resulting in choosing an aperture of f/8 at 1/125s. I chose to shoot at an ISO setting of around 400 or 800, which meant I could get fairly fast shutter speeds with a limited amount of noise. To carry on with the black and white theme which was present ion my past photos from the project, I made all the Soho images b&w in Lightroom and increased the contrast to achieve a similar likeness to Ilford XP2 which I shot in the past shoots. Comparing the digital and film photos shot in the two test shoots, I felt they looked very similar in contrast so I though they still looked coherent as a series.
The Soho shoot was definitely my most successful shoot out of the whole Environment project yet; I really like the results which I achieved, mostly by focusing on such an interesting location. The street / photojournalism style in the shoot definitely interests me and this is the route in which I want to take for the unit.
Joe Haines 