Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/04/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 30/4/00 1:16 AM, Hugh Thompson at painfree@istar.ca wrote: > I am waiting Johnny's comments on anticipation, that is the key in my view - > see it, shoot it, move on! Sorry for not picking up on this earlier, Hugh. I will stick around and shoot several frames if I have not been spotted or if I have been spotted and no-one seems to care. There is nothing more gut-churning than seeing an 'almost' frame in the negatives that you know in your heart you could have worked on. More often than not, however, it is the first frame that works. Second most common, it is the last frame. Sometimes you can shoot almost a whole roll and no-one blinks an eye. Usually however as soon as I make eye contact I smile and move on. I move pretty slowly along the street, maybe 1-2 mph, just cruising. I reckon I cover about 10 miles a day. I have a few favourite street corners where I will dilly dally for a while, often criscrossing the road. This is where I find most of my couples, at certain times of day. Hugh raised the key point of 'anticipation' and IMHO this is something you learn from a particular street. I can often spot a potential subject a hundred yards away now just from a pose or the way the crowd is moving just there. For example, yesterday I spotted a funny movement in the crowd, and when I moved towards it I found a half naked man upside down with his head in a bucket outside a fancy department store. That was half a roll. However, just as often, I only spot the subject a split second before the shutter fires. In these circumstances everything happens so fast that the person who has been photographed may see the camera go to the eye but doesn't actually register the fact they've been immortalised. My analogy is with jazz here... in jazz you should always know what the next note you're going to play is, even if you only know a hundredth of a second before you play it. I initially found it very difficult to react to things that fast and missed a lot of shots. My initial solution was to hip/chest shoot, but that was wrong (I do it one or two frames a roll nowadays). Subsequently I went the zone focussing route with the camera strapped to the hand. If you're really alert this gets your reaction times down to less than a second, and still lets you compose. But I found that I needed a shutter speed of at least 1/250 to get sharp pictures, which often meant I was working at apertures of f/4 or wider. I got pretty good at judging 7 feet, which is my working distance, but ultimately this led to actually focussing with any lens longer than 28. Certainly the 50. This allows even wider apertures which lets you slice through a crowd. I've really learned to trust my guts about people's behavior. Sometimes you just get a sense that a particular person is going to do something. I will stick around on the basis of that feeling, and about 50% of the time it pays off. For example I was sitting in a coffee shop window yesterday and there was a couple sitting the other side of the window on the terrace. I just had a feeling about them, and prefocused both cameras (28 and 50). Sure enough, a 'scene' began to develop which ended with them standing up and going in different directions... very sad and intense. Who knows if I got it, but if I didn't it was my own fault. One thing I have really learned is that, for me, the good pictures come out of my own emotional responses to people within the crowd. When I trust that, I seem to get better pictures. On those days when I walk through the crowd and feel no flickers of contact or recognition, it's tough and unrewarding. - -- Johnny Deadman photos: http://www.pinkheadedbug.com music: http://www.jukebox.demon.co.uk