Connecting Essay - Bas Losekoot

Here is one of my documentary street photographs. I shot this using a reasonably slow shutter speed, which means that some light motion blur is captured in the foreground. This creates some contrast to the background of the image, in which there are two women at a table outside a coffee shop, which have been frozen still with no motion blur at all. The presence of both the people who are still and those who are moving at a fast pace can be used to suggest that within an urban environment, there are some that have to frequently be in places such as in the workplace in order to survive, whereas others have the financial luxury to be able to engage in leisure activities throughout the day. In editing this image, I increased the saturation of the colours, as well as increasing the contrast of the image. The image creates a positive mood as a result, which I feel is added to by my choice to focus on the two women have a friendly conversation at the table rather than the people walking by.




 

 The above image is by Dutch Documentary Photographer Bas Losekoot, and it was taken in Sao Paolo, Brazil. This image has a very muted colour palette; the foreground of the image depicts three men and a woman, all in smart shirts, with one man holding a clipboard, and the shirts consist of muted shades of blue and grey. The presence of formal shirts and the clipboard suggests that they are out doing some kind of work project. Therefore, within the context, we can draw the connotations that the muted shades of their shirts can suggest the mundaneness of everyday work life in an urban environment. The muted colours captured in the image are contrasted by the colour manipulation used in editing, which has added a lot of saturation to the image, therefore giving the image a much warmer tone.

My image was directly inspired by the work of Bas Losekoot. A lot of his images have one of two people in them that particularly stand out, which is the area of the image he focuses on. This is something I have tried to capture in my image; I focused on the two women on the table as I felt that they were the ones that you could tell a story from by looking at them. Losekoot's image uses a similar concept with the man with the clipboard, as he is framed using the rule of thirds composition rule meaning that you notice him first, and that you then create connotations based on what he is wearing, the clipboard he is holding and his facial expression. My use of colour is also heavy inspired by Losekoot's work; his image all follow the style of having saturated colours and high contrast, which is something I tried to imitate in editing the photo.