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But not necessarily helping them with their enquiries...
Talking to the Police by Garry Knight, on Flickr
Talking to the Police by Garry Knight, on Flickr
Talking to the Police
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But not necessarily helping them with their enquiries...
Talking to the Police by Garry Knight, on Flickr
"Excellent" candid street style capture Garry, with plenty of interest and very nice mono presentation.
"You seem to be producing some very nice material of late using that iPhone of yours"
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That's a nice visually striking shot and with lots going on. I like it
Neither of them look happy though, they look as if they've a couple who've just had a tiff
It doesn't look as though the young man cares too much for the police
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Thanks, George. It's the easiest camera I have, and I find myself clicking off dozens of shots on some days. Which increases the chance that one or two of them might work.
That's a nice visually striking shot and with lots going on. I like it
Neither of them look happy though, they look as if they've a couple who've just had a tiff
I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) hear their conversation. The iPhone's effective 77mm focal length helps with that. But it did seem serious, and subdued, even.
It doesn't look as though the young man cares too much for the police
It's always possible that that's a bag of swag at his feet, and they're just waiting for the paddy wagon to turn up. Or they could have been talking about the wonderful weather (I took it in February). Who knows?
Anyway, thanks everyone for your Likes.
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I agree with that statement Garry, there is a certain amount of freedom when using a cell phone for street stuff and more often than not a cell phone is perfectly adequate for street snapping.
One of the problems I have is not snapping enough material when I'm out. It probably goes back to my film days where as often as not I only had 12 shots (medium format) on a roll of film so you needed to make every shot count and I must admit I still have to think that a snap is going to be usable before I fire away. The other failing I know I have with regards to my street photography is too tight on framing, something else that goes back to my film days ie trying to get the ultimate quality out of every negative. I notice that you & Lee @Merlin5 don't worry too much about including a bit of the environment in your shots and it certainly does work.
I was only looking at one of Lee's snaps the other day of a couple of ladies in some sort of costume at Threadneedle St and thought how good & spontaneous the shot was and how I'd have missed it because there was a roadworks sign right next to the ladies. This sort of thing happens time & time again with me and its something I know I need to correct as this sort of thing is part of what's happening on the streets.
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I remember reading, though I forget where, that some street toggers insist that one should include some context. For me, it often happens by accident, when I only have a couple of seconds to grab the shot.
Once we came out of lockdown, I made the decision to shoot anything that looked vaguely interesting, and to start a Flickr album called Scrapbook, just to get back into photography and upload stuff that wasn't street and wasn't perfect. I still do that to a large extent as I feel it makes me more ready to click away when there's something more interesting in front of me. Still, I've always made it a practice to get it in one shot, or two at most. That's unlikely to ever change.
Once we came out of lockdown, I made the decision to shoot anything that looked vaguely interesting, and to start a Flickr album called Scrapbook, just to get back into photography and upload stuff that wasn't street and wasn't perfect. I still do that to a large extent as I feel it makes me more ready to click away when there's something more interesting in front of me. Still, I've always made it a practice to get it in one shot, or two at most. That's unlikely to ever change.
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I think that's a very good idea and something I might try myself, I'll probably get there eventually when its just too late but at the moment at least there's some people around who I can aspire to and try and follow their examples.
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To be honest George, it's always best, and I always try to but don't often succeed, to omit anything in the frame that doesn't add to the subject matter. But sometimes it's not possible. In the costume drama photo, the road sign doesn't add anything, at least, not to me, and I'd rather have not had it in. At the same time, I feel that cropping in tight to avoid the sign and people around would look a bit claustrophobic for want of a better description. The other thing is that I've recently learnt it's good to keep the aspect ratio of my camera. My camera has a 3:2 aspect ratio when I look through the viewfinder, and so whenever I crop, I keep to that 3:2. And so if I cropped in tighter I'd lose half their heads and feet.
I think it's generally nice to have some 'airiness' in the frame around the subjects, plus as garry mentioned, it's good to add some context. But yeah, there's a lot in my photo that doesn't need to be there.
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I couldn't agree with you more and in no way was I criticising your's or Garry's @garryknight work, quite the contrary. I think that most of your street photography work is outstanding by any standards especially in real terms as you are still quite new to this medium. Its taken me a long time of snapping to get to the technical standard that I am at but genuinely feel I'm a little too set in my ways what with checking surroundings/backgrounds and garbage on the sidewalks etc that I feel may distract from the snap I'm trying to get, and slowly realising with street style photography this just doesn't matter quite so much as its all part of the streets.
I agree with you on keeping the same aspect ratio if you can as when looking through the view finder, something not many of us do. Quite different from when I was shooting 6 x 6 cm medium format stuff when you would have to shoot square and work out at the time of shooting if it would fit a 10 x 8 print upright or view properly, and strangely enough I still like the square format although I don't use it these days.
Still its all a huge learning curve for us all and as I said to Garry recently in a comment about wall eyed you learn something new every day.
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Ditto on that one. My main excuse for that decision is that many of my photos have been used under a Creative Commons licence on various websites and even in print publications. And I tend to think that they (the latter, at least) are laid out with fixed-ratio spaces for photos. In a columnar format, it's probably only the width that's important unless some text is to flow around the photo, in which case even that might not matter. So my excuse is probably a poor one and I could just shoot everything in different aspect ratios as I see fit. I mean, some people are shooting 3x2 cameras, others are shooting 4x3, and some have a wider camera like the Canon Powershot SX series that looks good at 16x9. And then the person wanting to use the photo on a website or a publication probably crops the photo down to just the bits they want, often because they just want the subject and not the context.