My partner and I live in the centre, so we chose the place located in the centre of the city. This time, my partner chose the Queen Victoria Market as the shooting place for me. She was very familiar with the place, because of loving food and cooking, she comes here one or two times a week. Although my home is very close to here, I have hardly ever been there. I just used to pass by when I went to school. I chose Royal Arcade for her. Because of my homework, I used to go there every week. It wasn’t a large place so that we can walk through it soon. So, we all chose the places that we were very familiar with.

List what you know, don’t know and expect to see and/or hear in your pair’s location.

We learned about the business hours of each shooting place and decided to spend one day, starting from the business hours to the end of the business hours, and taking photos almost every two hours. This setting made me nervous actually, because I was afraid that the market would be the same from morning till night, and then I couldn’t take the photo with any changes. This is related to one of the themes of the first blog: list what you see, what you do not see, what you expect to see or hear. Influenced by the market of my own country, the market should be like that there are very many stalls selling all kinds of meat and vegetables, and then the whole environment is full of unpleasant smells in my mind. That’s one of the reasons why I rarely go to the market, so I got fully prepared before shooting at Victoria Market. But when I got into the market at half past seven in the morning (business hours started at 6, but I got up late), it was different from what I expected. Although there are places to sell meat and seafood, all in the form of the shop, and the food placed in the shop looks very neat, and there is no strange smell. It made me very surprised and happy. What’s more, I’ve seen some changes in traffic and environment at different times. I thought at 7:30 in the morning it was 1.5 hours after business hour starting, there would be many people, but it turned out to be few people there. After 11:00, there were more people, and the most at 1:30 p.m.

Since I’ve watched Patrick Pound exhibition and read Mason and Bogost, when I started shooting, I considered the question that how to relate the construction of the whole background with something specific perfectly without conflict. I planned to make something unique like the pictures I watched on the exhibition, such as blocking a little lens intentionally, or setting a common thing in each picture and so on. But finally, I chose the ordinary way to shoot. After all, I think the pictures should be visible and close to life and the variety of shops and shopping people in the market can be seen as a combination of background construction and specific things. This combination should be the most common, but also the truest combination. In the reading of Mason and Bogost, it has emphasized the importance of composition and some details of the shooting, a good composition can make this photo express deeper meaning, and the details can perfect the whole background. But my shooting technique and equipment were not so good, and there were too many people in the market at noon, I was too shy to shoot the details at close range and only took pictures of the big environment, such as a corridor. So the pictures seem a little casual. I might still have to pay more attention to the composition and angle of the shots.