Exercise: A sequence of composition

It took several goes to get a sequence together for this exercise; I tried a group of street performance dancing outside a shop in Cambridge, and a group of people punting on the river - neither of which generated a satisfactory final image. This weekend I was in Brighton, and decided to have a go at getting a picture from the Brighton Marathon, which was being run this morning.

The route along the seafront (towards the finishing line) was heaving with people, and I had a couple of false starts trying to capture the sense of excitement and activity about the place - from the roadside it was difficult to take any pictures without unwanted limbs and heads getting in the way of my preferred composition. Eventually however I found an elevated spot about four hundred metres from the finish, from where I could see the runners on the road, the promenade lined with people, the beach and finally a strip of sea. On the beach was a café, with a very prominent sign advertising fish and chips, and I decided I'd like a picture of the runners passing this sign.

This was the first picture I took – just to set the scene for myself really, and to see what I could get into the frame:

f/16, 1/125s, focal length 50.00mm

I reviewed the image files on the camera as I took them so that I could arrive at the picture I wanted consciously, rather than through serendipity. From looking at this first image I could see straight away that I wasn't going to get the picture I wanted in a landscape format: the shape was wrong as to get both runners and the sign into the picture the sign had to be top right and the runners already passed it (out of the way of temptation) in the bottom left corner. From then on I shot the photographs in portrait format.

f/16, 1/100s, focal length 50.00mm

This shot has too much foreground in it, and the central position of the café sign still doesn't allow room to show the relationship I wanted to suggest between the runner and the sign. After this one I positioned the sign in the top left corner, and waited for a runner to take up a bit more room in the foreground. I kept the camera to my eye for several shots, relying on the cheering from the crowd to alert me to when a runner was about to enter the shot. The next few shots were therefore not reviewed immediately. (The following are examples from about 20 shots):

When I reviewed these shots I realised that runners in white shirts weren't standing out sufficiently against the white marathon banner. I took a few more, therefore, and focussed on runners in coloured shirts. When I reviewed the final images on the computer screen, I decided that this one was composed more or less as I wanted:

I like the way the runner is linked to the café sign through a diagonal line of spectators and promenaders. I cropped the image to remove some of the foreground and straightened the horizon. I also increased saturation slightly so that the colours in the sign would stand out more on the final image.