[2].jpg "R0013735 (Medium)")
(When Three Know It: The good thing about always carrying a camera with you is that there may be an interesting scene showing up in any minute and you will never miss it. I shot this pocture in the morning. Since the three placard ladies could not see me, I stood in front of them and took time to meter the scene with my GX200 before shooting the picture. The big characters on the placard read, "Good job positions; Click and you'll get them", advertising a website for job seekers. The common saying has it that, "When three know it, all know it." Maybe that's why there were three of them)
As I had read about superimposition as a composition technique to reveal the inner nature of a scene, I knew what exactly I was doing when taking the picture of the three placard ladies. Some weeks ago, I also used the same technique in shooting the strawberry lady in an open market with a red lamp shade superimposing on her head. There, I tried to use superimposition in the composition to question the credibility of the lady who said that her extremely low-priced strawberries were first grade produce from Japan. Here, most people being worried and pre-occupied by finding a job is the meaning in the scene I hope to reveal in this photo.
In fact, three persons with the same placards advertising for a website was a rare sight. Normally, there would be only one person deployed for this sort of street publicity work each time. This rare scene says much about the growing business opportunities for the job-matching website with the economy in the doldrums. The three similar subjects alone are emphatical enough to bring out the dire need among people for jobs. Actually, those three people were part-time workers paid on an assignment basis. With the superimposition of the placards on them, the image echos visually to the pre-occupation of seeking a job on people's minds.
The more a photographer shoots, the more he or she'll begin to refine the eye for composition. This will make it a second nature to the photographer to frame a once-in-a-lifetime situation when it presents itself. Having been taking pictures every day, I was immediately aware of the appeal of the scene across the street at first sight. With the knowledege I have learnt in the literature on photography, I hope to achieve the result on purpose, not by chance. This makes photography a much more fun thing to do.
Comments
The pattern of three people holding advertisement pads blocking their heads itself is rather humorous;
Besides that, the obscurity of individual identity extracts some kind of generalized depiction of the mentality of many people during this harsh economic environment.
Although without any striking extraordinaries of the subject, and technically simple, this photo still manages to give me a strong feeling. And I guess it has the essence of photographing, which is to capture the string of time and to express the thoughts and emotion of photographer.
And you put it much better than I did.