Trying my hand at a bit of documentary photography

As part of a project at Uni we were given different sections of a brief to chose from, one on documentary, one on portraits, one on fashion an one on advertising. My main instinct was to go with fashion or portraiture because that’s my thing and it’s what I’ve always done and it’s the area that I want to go into. However, in our first year we are graded, but these grades do not count towards our final mark for our degree. As a result our tutors have told us that if we want to experiment across different genres of photography then now is the time to do it, next year is when we need to pick our chosen area and focus on it.

Instead of taking the comfortable option of fashion or portraiture I chose documentary and photographed my boyfriend’s martial arts class. Apart form my boyfriend I didn’t know anybody else at the class and had never been there before. I got permission from the people who ran it and went along to the class equipped with my Canon 1000D. I wasn’t allowed to get up too close while the action was happening, firstly so that I didn’t get in the way and end up getting hurt but also so that I didn’t distract the class. To get closer shots of the action I hired a 100mm lens from the Uni stores, I had never used this lens before and so it was a good excuse for me to try it out.

The shots that I got were not astounding, but I feel that I got some quite good action shots. I wanted to show the interaction of them as a group and the way that they all worked together. Although the photographs may not be of a high standard, I’m glad that I shot the images, firstly because some action shots will make a nice variation to my portfolio but because by going there and taking photographs of people I don’t know, some of whom may not be particularly at ease in front of the camera, has boosted my confidence in this. I am used to shooting people who I have asked or who have offered to model for me, who I have had a chance to meet before hand even if just for a few minutes, to build a rapport. By going and shooting total strangers in a documentary style I have taken a huge step outside my comfort zone and it has loosened me up into doing this more often.
Here are a couple of the images that I got, very little photoshopping has been done, it's just to show examples of the style of images that I took: