Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Yes, well since nothing is happening on LUG, apart from the usual camera-hugging, here's the news from Moscow. Written for a different list, but you guys aren't busy anyway, so I thought a copy would brighten up your lives (and my brand is Leica, yes). If you are under 18, or you live in a place where the actual *use* of a camera is illegal, you should not be reading this. Last warning: this about the actual *taking* of pictures.... Johnny Deadman wrote: > In fact, even if you're not posting images I'd like to hear what people are > up to. Bee, you still alive? Who me, yes absolutely. What I'm up to, you ask.... (warning for Steve Lehooray, who thinks I'm full of myself (which is probably true, because a lot of people tell me that): don't read, or you're hurt yourself). News from the Ostfront: I've been printing off the 50 rolls I reported earlier, and I have to say I'm not disappointed. No I'm not going to scream "masterpieces", but it's working out pretty much as I had in mind. Except for this tremendous scene that went on right before my eyes; I had seated myself smack in the middle of a bunch of young folk. You know, the sort that drink way too much and do drugs they maybe shouldn't be doing, yet still play on guitars and sing and try to be generally artistic. It's a phenomenon here. Now there was this truly pretty girl (pretty in a quiet sort of way), who was young and well dressed. It's the type that has their parents worried to death for hanging out with the wrong friends (I know parents like that with a daughter who went hanging out with those characters and from the guitar scene made it to being the lover of a mobster with a really big Mercedes and only half a face because his rivals had tried to do him in with acid). Anyway, this girl was really sweet, but she must have been swallowing some of the wrong stuff because she was pretty hysterical. She wasn't shouting, but she had her face wet with tears and couldn't stand in one place and clamped onto everyone to complain very emotionally about how her boyfriend said he'd be back in 5 minutes, and that was half an hour ago. It was a beautiful sight. Then this boyfriend enters the scene; a real loser, but he was very nice to her, I'll hand him that. She doesn't beat the shit out of him, which is what I expected, but rather mixes anger, anxiety and reproach with tenderness. Better than cinema! I did get some shots, but she was so mobile that I had a hard time getting anything decent. The pics are nice for me as a memory stimulator, but not as anything with any value for people who weren't there. So that part failed. I've only printed half of what I marked for printing, though; I haven't been feeling quite well. The last day in the darkroom that I spent with these streetpics, I actually drove my style-attempts over the edge. I mean, I'm prefogging the paper for this series, as well as printing on a very soft grade, to create some distance between reality and the images. But on that last day I took it a bit too far and some pics are really too muddy, without it giving them something "extra". So I quit printing the streetpics and busied myself with other projects, as well as living life in general, which I'm enjoying a lot, lately. One project I'm doing on the street (I won't bore you with studio fun, okay), is photographing tiny bits of walls. The houses here have really nice pastel colors, and there's a bit of graffiti here and there, too. I'm making them into abstract pics with nice, muted colors. Yes, with peeling paint and all that. I'm just testing, for now, with a 50mm and a diopter. I'm going to get a Leica-R 60mm macro though, and then do it for real. It should turn into tableaus of four square pics, each; compositions of four abstracts. I know I should be doing this with my Hassy, but I'm very tired of talking to the police and security guards. Setting up obvious pro-gear is a pretty sure-fire way of seeing a police station from the inside. And no, flashing Photo-ID's doesn't help a lot; it may even make things worse. If you're doing something "official", then it clearly requires official treatment, which is done in police stations. Streetphot is very hazardous here anyway; the police don't like it, Joe Average hates it (everyone's still paranoid) and can be really bad about it, store owners are spooked by it and send their guards out on the street to talk to you and check things out, security guards of private and non-private businesses will try to catch you to haul you inside and take your rolls away, and then there's the most astounding number of criminals big and small, who can really do very unpleasant things to you, if they think they're in the picture, or if they think the invariably illegal goods they're putting into the truck might be on the pic. You guys out there.... you don't know what trouble is, okay.