Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry was my first go to for colour documentary photography due to his beautiful way of capturing so much beauty and so much colour all within one image.

McCurry’s most famous image Afghan Girl is one of my favorite documentary photographs due to the power of the shot and also for how famous the photograph is. McCurry’s work will always incorporate a lot of colour he generally shoots head and shoulder portraits of people with beautiful coloured eyes, people with colourful clothing or people whose face tells a lot.

I decided on researching more into Steve McCurry due to my love for his portraits and his use of colour in his photography.

Steve McCurrys career was launched of the image above which is one of the most famous documentary pictures in the world called Afghan Girl. This picture is of an Afghanistan refugee fleeing across the border into neighboring Pakistan during the soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

McCurry used the colour of the girls eyes to really draw you into the shot he also shot her at an angle looking over her shoulder behind her the background isn't distracting so all your attention goes straight onto her eyes.

This shot highlights my love for the use of colour in McCurrys shots as in the shot you an clearly see that the bright red turban adds so much to the shot. Further more the use of depth of field is very nicely controlled in McCurrys shots as the face on portraits will always have a lot of shallow depth in them and his more action shots will always have a deep depth of field to them.

This is something to keep in mind how much of the image do I want to keep in focus with portraits i may want to knock out the background with some shallow depth on 1.4 to give it a nicer look.

This especially works if there is something to look at like the bright coloured turban in McCurrys shot but you can replace this with anything like the detail on someones face or tattoos .

In this shot the a man can be seen being held up by a lot of other men he is a bright green with green turban and the rest are in red making the man in green pop out of the shot. The shot was taken from up high and shot downwards meaning McCurry would of had some knowledge to what was going to happen to plan to get up high to grab the shot.

This shows me that planning is very important when shooting a fast moving subject or subjects that can change or that you have little knowledge about. When shooting it is best to ask whats going to happen in case you need to plan agead to get a certain shot to stop yourself missing the shot.