Exercise 21 - Making figures anonymous

The purpose of this exercise is to discover ways of including a person or people in a photograph while deliberatly making them unrecognisable and, as a result, less prominent.

I took this picture recently when working on an earlier exercise and when I looked at it, thought that unless you knew the person, they remained perfectly anonymous in the shot as they were in silhouette. I think it works well and I was extremely lucky to have a friendly neighbourhood seagull flying by just as I took the shot.

It could be any person sitting there as he is in silhouette.

I know that I have used the image below in the previous exercise but there is nothing more guaranteed to make someone anonymous than to catch them moving in your picture. As I said before, I took several images of people in a small courtyard and combined them into one to show more movement that I had managed to achieve in each individual picture.
I like this, I deliberately chose people who were either caught in a blur or were colourful.

I'll continue with this exercise and see what else I can find as I think I can discover other ways of being anonymous.

Here's a panorama of my local church with 2 figures standing in the middle of the aisle. As they are such a small part of the whole, they are fairly inconspicuous to the viewer. The whole picture, when stitched together, was 24.5 inches by 3.6 inches which gives a very narrow view of the church inside. You would need a piece of specialist equipment such as a gigapan to get a much wider view.

Exercise 20 - Busy traffic

I had a problem with this exercise as I had just changed my camera from a Nikon D200 professional body to a Nikon D5000 consumer body and as such do not have the range of features with regard to speed and aperture that I had before. As it was I had to up the ISO from 100 to 800 to get any movement in the shots at all. When I tried to take some decent images on the seafront with the sun shining down on a small car park, there was almost complete burnout of the images.

In the end I took several pictures at our local Town Mill with the camera on a tripod. The shutter was as slow as I could get it with the smallest aperture (f22 at 1/8th second). I decided to import the main movements from each individual photo to one main image and combine.

Completed combined image

I had fun with this picture cutting, erasing and combining all the pictures. I thought that with the limitations of my equipment, I did quite a good job.