Blog Post #26

Point and Shoot events

As someone whose preferred style of photography is mainly Street Photography or Documentary type photography, I am attracted to the spontaneity and adrenalin rush you can get when you know you have captured something unique and never to be repeated. In Street Photography there are two main recognised styles and these are “hunting” and fishing”. When hunting, you are constantly on the move, your eyes scanning all around you for opportunities and things that are happening out of the ordinary or maybe comical or aesthetically balanced. When fishing, you have found a location that shows promise and you stay in one position waiting for a particular event to take place. It could be you have found a shaft of light between buildings for example and you stand waiting for someone to come into the shot then take the shot at a chosen moment. It may or may not work out but then fishing is a gamble.

It is for this reason therefore that I struggle to understand the attraction of events where you pay to be one of many photographers who get the opportunity to photograph events that have been set up for you by the organisers. As with my topic last week about paying to have work exhibited, I am sure many people love these events and if they were not available they would not be taking pictures. I don’t have a problem with them if that is the case but I personally am just not comfortable with them and don’t see me ever attending one. Some of the settings are magnificent and provide opportunities to get shots that you never would if you just turned up yourself at the location. In some of the events the idea is to recreate a moment in history that produces an image that could be argued was taken way back then. All the characters in period costume, old cars, aircraft or trains etc are set up to form a tableau for attendees to shoot. Other events offer moody shots with effects and lighting on a prop or in a situation that make them very attractive. Once the shot is set-up the photographers (could be as many as 100), are invited to take the shot and move along so others can get in.

It is at this point where I have my issue. What is the point of everyone taking the same shot? There may be slight variations permitted or slightly different shooting angles but in essence they are all the same. I have seen many shots taken at these events that are identical, but from different photographers. They can be great photographs but where is the element of creativity ? What has the photographer contributed to the outcome ? To have someone set up the lighting, subject, effects, shooting point and maybe even suggested exposure values is not my kind of photography. It could be argued that many great studio photographers work in this way whereby all the set-up, lighting, props, model etc are all put in place by the assistants ready for the photographer to come in and compose the shot, then click and go. Not for me.

In the end, in some ways, it comes down to the post-processing and this can be the differentiator between good and great shots in this type of scenario. If you are competent in Photoshop, Lightroom or any other post-processing software you can add your own style to the image. For example if its a retro set up you could use a Kodachrome effect rather than the pin sharp perfect rendering of a high resolution mega pixel camera. In the end however the subject is still what it is. It’s what the organisers wanted you to take, not necessarily what you wanted to take. I believe there is some leeway but with many photographers having paid a lot of money to attend, your time and options are limited I would imagine.

As I mentioned previously, although these are great events for some people, and they would possibly not be taking photos otherwise, they are not for me. I would rather buy some books or pay to go on a workshop or tutorial where I actually learned something rather than get the opportunity to take a great picture to hang on my wall, which by the way is the same picture that is probably hanging on the walls of other participants that took the same shot. I must point out that I have never attended one of these events and my opinions are based on my preferred style of photography, listening to the experiences of photographers that have attended these events and research I have done on-line.

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Peter Degnan