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Some Shooting in the Streets This was a good day, a proper wrapping up of the weekend. I dropped off three rolls of film at the camera store this morning, two black and white and a roll 
of Ektachrome 100s (color slides). There was another roll of 100s in the F-5
with maybe 6 shots remaining. I finished shooting these and another roll of
VPS (a professional color print film often used by wedding photographers)
at Kieran's going away lunch at the Le Cheval Vietnamese restaurant near the
office at noon.
Drop those two rolls off at the camera shop to pick up the prints later that
afternoon, load another roll of black and white and go across the street
where Jerry Brown, the new mayor of Oakland, inaugurated that morning in
the Paramount Theater down the street, is holding forth to a large crowd in
front of city hall.
That's about right for a week's shooting. Five rolls of film, shot
with some semblance of intelligence: Look for an opportunity, set
The going away party for Kieran was nice. I shot perhaps 40 photographs,
each person at the party posed for a portrait with Kieran. The F-5,
These are essentially posed, but the people you are
Shooting Jerry Brown's speech was a different and much more interesting animal. For the party you want to deliver a very specific kind of print: Happy people doing happy things. Nothing wrong with that, but its limiting, and not the reason you pack a camera all the time. Everyone was watching Jerry Brown speak with the exception of some small groups at the back with political signs or lost in conversations of their own, oblivious to the world around them. Had Kieran's party not been scheduled at the same time as Brown's inauguration, I would have packed two cameras, one with a long lens, a 200mm or 300mm to get in close and put the mayor in the middle of the frame. If I were covering this for a publication, this would have been mandatory: If its Jerry Brown's speech, you damned better deliver a good shot of Jerry Brown.
But this is for me. I'm shooting this for my own amusement
I'll have the negatives tomorrow. I'm able to get color prints in a couple of hours, but with black and white contact sheets they need a full day from morning til late afternoon. If you bring them in at noon, you get them at the end of the next day. I have contact sheets run of the color print negatives as well, have them cut into strips of 6 and a black and white contact sheet made from the roll, so although I got the prints in two hours, I won't get the negatives and contact sheet until tomorrow at the end of the day with the rest. Color negatives printed as black and white? Works fine. |
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it up and shoot; no
knee jerk gunfight at the OK corral blast it if it moves action. You only get
so many "good" pictures out of each roll. A professional will shoot a lot
more film and will get a larger number of good photographs for that effort,
but I'm not a professional and I don't have a client to satisfy at the end of
the day other than me and I'm easy. At this point in my evolution as a
photographer, I'm happy with an interesting mood or expression. There's the
usual predilection for photographs of pretty girls, but that's hardly unique
or a problem. Some photographers spend their lives shooting pretty girls
and nobody seems surprised.
using a Nikon SB-28 strobe light, is something from another planet. It
is very, very, very hard to screw up a shot. The people are crisp
and in focus and the exposure is right. There are things to watch out
for, but they are quite manageable. Not that long ago, this flash business
was difficult to get just right, but now, with built in computer chips,
its hard to go wrong, particularly when you are using a model like the F-5
which is considered the state of the art.
shooting are happy to
be there and having fun, and if you watch them carefully, you can get
them in an attractive and relaxed mood. Overall everyone was happy with
the prints. You don't get this quality of photograph very often from the
guy down the hall with a camera and it's nice to be able to do it. John
Free, my instructor in a street shooting class conducted in Southern
California last summer, contended that the pleasure you get as a
photographer comes from giving your photographs to the people you shoot.
I'm not altogether convinced, but he's probably right. Where do they go
otherwise? In some file cabinet to gather dust until you die and then make
the acquaintance of the trash can and a trip to the dump.
and my interest
is in the crowd. Walk through the people and look, look for something that
strikes you as interesting, a person lost in thought, for example,
oblivious to his or her surroundings. The F-5 is quiet, really quiet. You
can be right up next to someone and they won't hear any noise. You can
shoot the thing snick - snick - snick - snick if you want, and they
won't hear a sound. And if they notice you taking their picture? Well,
this is a news event and there are photographers all over the place and
they're supposed to take pictures, right? No one seemed upset, one or
two a little startled or surprised perhaps to see you there just off
to the side, but otherwise happy.