Exercise 10 - 'best' moments

This exercise involves capturing bursts of activity from which to try to catch the best moment.  I have always found it very interesting to observe how much the composition and mood of a photograph can change within a few seconds.  This is a good way to improve street photography skills.

For the exercise, I spent the afternoon in the Liverpool Street/Spitalfields Market area and shot dozens of sequences.  Some worked and some didn't.  Trying to capture people walking towards me was difficult for obvious reasons of focussing, although I do like the end result when I can snap someone looking straight at me.  Many of the interactions I captured would have been difficult to predict so using this approach was quite useful.  I unintentionally managed to get someone picking their nose and a street vendor crying, as well as lots of warm human moments.

The first sequence in the previous post captured an older guy quite unpredictably asking a young man for some money.  The image I chose was the one showing point where the 'beggar' looks down at the young man's hand to see what money he has found in his pocket, maybe wondering how much of it he will get.  A female traveller coming up from the station seems to be looking on, leading the eye back to the exchange.

The second sequence was shot in Spitalfields Market right at the end of the day.  I noticed two guys in a food trailer having an intense conversation and sampling the leftovers as they cleared up. There was something unusual about their behaviour/demeanour that I couldn't quite put my finger on but they just didn't quite seem like stereotypical fast food sellers.  When I later Googled www.streetkitchen.co.uk, I discovered that I had photographed Mark Jankel and world famous chef Jun Tanaka!

The first image in the sequence is my chosen one as the 'best' of the set as it depicts the intensity of their exchange as had caught my eye in the first place.

One of my favourite images of the day was the only salvageable image from a sequence taken at an outdoor cafe on Dray Walk in the Truman Brewery complex.  It somehow captures the business of the area but also the very personal moment between two people when time stops for friendship.