The Journey

I took these images on a journey from my home near Stroud to my workplace in Central London.  Clearly they are taken during the COVID pandemic and they are at a time when the country is trying to phase itself out of lockdown.

Life where I live has started to ease considerably, our area has a very low confirmed case count and as a result the controls are considerable less than they were at the peak.  But London on the other hand is in a very different position with most people not yet returning to their offices.

I found the entire journey surreal as it felt like I was rewinding a few months back to the time when the lockdown started in full.  London is pretty well deserted, distancing on public transport is hardly necessary as there is hardly anybody on it, and there are hand sanitiser stations everywhere.  As I left London at the end of the day, I felt like I was leaving a disaster zone.

All of these images are taken with my phone.  I wanted to take a lot of images and I wanted to capture everything I saw on the way, including in passing.  Stopping and framing every image would have meant that I had to take fewer images since it would have taken all day to make the journey. I also think that the obvious use of a phone makes the images feel much more like a story that you might see on social media, and therefore more personal, less formal.

The Images

Learning Points

• Almost every detail on the journey is of interest in the context of the journey itself.  Images that standalone would be meaningless convey more information when included in a series.  When taking a more formal series, this is an important point to remember, there is a risk that taking a more formal approach could lead to only taking images that seem more significant at the time, which would mean missing out on some of the details.
• Deliberately including information in the image can improve what it conveys.  For example, the scene taking in an underground station, I have deliberately included the announcement sign in order to show the time the image was taken.  Without this, its just an empty station which could probably be shot every day in the very early hours of the morning, but an empty station just ahead of rush hour is a very different concept.
• Framing, these shots are deliberately informal but there are some which I look at and wish I had paused and framed slightly differently.  The learning point is to always consider framing, I would certainly do that with a ‘proper’ camera, and there is no reason not to do the same with a phone camera, the difference is literally seconds. 
• A phone camera can be used to produce quite a reasonable set of images to tell a story.  Perhaps they would have been better if I had gone for a landscape orientation which I certainly would have done with a camera rather than a phone.  I don’t think the portrait orientation makes the content of these images any weaker, but the orientation / ratio creates the impression of a phone camera and therefore perhaps makes the images be taken a little less seriously.  (if this were a long term project rather than an exercise, I would consider cropping them to square images to reduce this effect.