ASSIGNMENT 9 - A THANKSGIVING DAY IN THE AMERICAN LIFE
This assignment of a narrative story follows the Thanksgiving day festivities of the Dalo family in Massachusetts, USA. Having been born and raised in the UK, I myself don't usually celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. Now invited to my American partner's family gathering this year, a family which has its own unique Thanksgiving traditions, I capture the day's activities from a outsider's perspective.
Reflection
In the lead up to this assignment, I was very worried. I didn't know how I'd be able to capture the day activities in the exact way I had envisioned them in my mind and I was always conscious of being a nuisance to people who had kindly invited me to their holiday (even though of course they were very happy for me to take photos). The day of, I actually enjoyed it and loved capturing unique, special moments. In the composition for a lot of my images, I focused on trying to translating the idea of being an outsider at an American holiday into each image. For this, I used a lot of framing strategies and different viewpoint levels in an effort to separate me from the photos' subjects. I think I succeeded with this in a few of the photos.
I also tried to avoid taking cliched photos of the family meal -- I took plenty of shots of the family sitting at the table, eating, plating up food, but to me those were less original, and so I tried to pick moments that were a bit different and told a more interesting story.
A big challenge however was the lighting, particularly for the images indoors with electric lighting as night fell. I had to bump up my ISO as using a tripod was not practical and I can see it's resulted in a bit of noise for a couple of photos. It's a shame for the Post-Meal nap photo under the table because I really love the idea of that image, but it was a struggle to get it to come out crisp, so different lighting could have really improved the shot. My other favorite image is probably the scene of the dog watching Jon carve the turkey - I got down for this one to take it at the dog's eye level, and I also like how Jon's shadow falls on the wall.