The Top Floor Flat

Saturday saw the successful completion of my Shoot Experience Documentary Photography workshop, and offered me an opportunity to show off my photos from the Michael Jackson mass moonwalk event the day before. While the first day of the course saw me out and about in Shoreditch snapping photos of unwitting bystanders, the second and final segment of the workshop gave us a chance to edit each other’s photos into a final documentary.

The class had originally included six students but one, tellingly, didn’t make it back to the second day of the course and called in sick while another had broken his camera during the previous two weeks so didn’t have any photos to share. Of the four of us remaining, the documentary subjects covered were mass moonwalking (my contribution of course), F1 racing, dilapidated buildings in Dalston and empty public spaces at night.

After the first day of the course, I had the sense that I would have gotten more out of the workshop had I known more about photography and photojournalism prior to attending and this feeling continued through the second day. I don’t know if it was the heat in the small room where our course took place or the fact that I didn’t have the same background in photography as some of the others but the five and a half hours seemed to drag by with a lot more looking at bad photos than learning about how to take good ones. There didn’t seem to be quite enough instructor feedback to help settle issues of order and editing as well – three of the four photographers (myself included) looked at the edits their peers had made in horror, stating flat out that those not only weren’t the pictures they would have chosen but that the rest of the group completely misunderstood the subject of their intended photo documentary. While of course such an editing process is highly subjective, it does seem a bit like we may have missed the point of the lesson if such wildly different interpretations, without a real understanding for the other’s perspective, were really the end result of our hours of work.

I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to attend the Shoot London Documentary Photography class and feel I did pick up some useful knowledge, particularly as to what types of photographs are generally included in a photo documentary. Unfortunately, I also feel I should have learned a lot more, especially related to how to approach people to ask permission to take their pictures. Although we were told this is a skill you learn over time, I would have liked to talk about the best ways to start such a conversation, what to do to make the person feel more comfortable, how to direct the shot, and what to do afterwards.

My experience with the Shoot Experience workshop was definitely mixed and not necessarily something I would repeat. As I have said, much of my ambivalence to the course could have been due to my lack of photography background and a student with a stronger understanding of the skills needed to take solid photographs may have gotten a lot more out of it. I am, however, very much looking forward to the next Shoot Experience event, Shoot Shoreditch (similar to Shoot London) in July which I highly recommend you attend if you can.

Shoot Experience is an experiential photography organisation. They host instructional workshops, photo treasure hunts, corporate events and have an online photo library containing selected photos from the Shoot Experience archive of events and competitions.