The Air Show 2011

I went to the air show with my family on Bournemouth beach and had a really good day photographing the planes and some of the other activities going on down there. One of my main themes for the day was to incorporate the people into the pictures of planes, but in my natural style, I did not want them to be right in the face of the camera and usually like their faces to be hidden as I think this adds a sense of the unknown to the image. This is created by the way the composition works and I particularly tried to underline the fact that the people were always well below the high flying planes but still looking up at them.

I took these two images before the air show started to try and capture some of the atmosphere and also to show how busy the beach was on that day! I especially tried to make the lady blurred by keeping her in the background of the image.I wanted to play around with how people take a significant part in the picture to show the age range of people at the air show as we can see on the beach there are many young children and families.

This man was standing in front of me for nearly the whole entire time! It was quite annoying as he was much taller than I am however I used this to my advantage and got some good pictures with him in front which made an interesting composition. Here he is photographing the helicopter. I think the image works effectively, they relate to two different photographers; one being Bruce Gilden as he got up close with many of his subjects and the other is Martin Parr as his images are very typically British and being the beach scene we can see this here.

These were the breitling wing walkers. They two images have quite plain backgrounds however in the first one I think this emphasises the acrobatics that the wing walker is doing. The second was one of three attempts with composition and lines. I wanted to make some more of the image and this was the best shot out of the three. I think the line of the street line at first takes your eye off the planes but then as you look further into the image you see them clearer.

These images are of the red arrows, the first image shows a whoosh round of colour in a rounded way with all the planes. The second image I think is again quite like a Martin Parr shot as the colours of the smoke is red white and blue; typically British colours and the seagulls in the sky are typical British beach birds flying high with the planes. The day at the Air Show gave me an opportunity to expand my photographic skills by using a slightly longer lense and trying to create playful yet still important images that have presense in a set.