Saturday, November 14, 2009

Assignment 2: Market

The Viktualienmarkt in the center of Munich offers many opportunities for colour combinations, with stalls selling fruit & vegetables, flowers, meat & poultry, and decorative items.  On the whole German supermarkets do not seel the wide variety of produce that English ones do, there is no equivalent to an out of town Sainsbury's or Tesco.  This means that if you want more unusual produce you must go to the market.

The main difficulty for a photographer is that the market is very busy on the weekends and the stall holders get quite fed up with people taking pictures and not buying anything.  I am starting to get used to getting dirty looks and even rude comments as I walk around with a camera, this is not limited to the market.  I guess I need to develop a thicker skin.

My first visit was on a Saturday morning and it proved difficult to get the images I wanted.  I took a day off work this week and found a quieter market coupled with much more tolerant stall holders.  The following images were made with a variety of telephoto primes, the new Canon 100mm IS, 200mm, and 300mm.  In practice I found that the longer focal lengths worked best as they allowed me to stand off and avoid interfering with the business of the stalls.  The drawback is that this means using natural lighting and thus a very shallow depth of field plus frequently having to raise the ISO quite significantly.

Complementary Colours













Similar Colours















Contrasting Colours














Colour Accent















Combinations


From this set of images I have worked up a few ideas for quartets.  The first selection is in landscape format



The weakest image in this set  is the artichoke and radishes, the colour saturation is very different from the other shots and does not combine very well.  In this case I am using Red-Yellow for the contrast and Red-Green for the harmonious, with the green stalks on the tomatoes providing the colour accent. An alternate set with similar subjects is the following in Portrait



Following is a variation on the same theme


The final quartet is my current choice, the colours balance across the images although perhaps it would work better with the tomatoes from the second quartet as the accent rather than the chilli's which are not very well focused.

No comments:

Post a Comment