When I was in Oslo early June, I tried to spend as much time as possible in the streets taking photos. For me, as I was there for work, it meant mainly in the morning on my way to the office. Which was good: the light was great. High enough to go between buildings, but not above them.
I took this photo first because when I walked past I could see the reflection of the sun in the building’s windows creating what looked to me like a cyclist with his head down on the road. I stopped, and thought it would be a great idea to have also a real cyclist in the frame to echo that reflection. So I waited for a while for that to happen.
I roughly put the light cyclist’s wheels on third lines intersections. It was kind of my main interest. The human cyclist is on a vertical third and close to a horizontal one.
I also made sure the cyclist was near the left hand side of the frame to give her room in front of her and somewhere to go into.
I decided to include the buildings in the background because that gave context to the scene: this is so obviously scandinavia, and in particular Norway. I could have cropped and maybe made a square frame to concentrate on a purely diagonal composition, but decided against it.
I wasn’t too worried that it would interfere with the subject because the lines (vertical for the buildings in the background and diagonal for the foreground) clearly broke the frame in two parts, which made things clear.
I used a fairly slow shutter speed (even at 28mm) to make the subject blurry through movement. Firstly because it means that the subject isn’t recognisable and therefore there is no risk of privacy issues. Secondly because it captures the movement and makes the photo more dynamic.