Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Ted, I am obviously not going to argue with your experience, but my own experience has been different. When I am in an exotic (for me) location, then I have a hard time seeing past the exoticism and end up taking quite ordinary pictures of interesting things. When I am in Rome, for instance, I end up taking lots of tourist snapshots--maybe good ones, certainly better than what the average tourist gets, but snapshots nonetheless. On the other hand, when I wander around Zurich with my Leica (and Brussels before that), then I am much more focused on finding pictorially interesting elements in these familiar surroundings. I feel the same away about other places that I visit frequently, like Copenhagen or London. There is also the practical advantage of being able to go back and shoot again if not satisfied with the initial effort. I am having this experience right now with a place in Zurich where there are two large chessboards on the ground and people come to play using 80 cm tall chess pieces. I have been there a couple of times with my Leica but have not yet made a picture worthy to be a PAW image, so I just keep going back. So I think there an argument for saying that for many of us, the strongest images are made close to home. Of course it helps if "home" is a reasonably large city with a lot of different things going on, but it is not strictly necessary. Nathan Ted Grant wrote: > Bill Clough wrote: > >>> Still--cannot it be argued that when photographers are > > in a place that is new and strong and strange, they are > > more alert--and therefore see photographs they might > > otherwise miss in more familiar settings?<<< > > Hi Bill, > Without question! And I speak from more than a few overseas assignments and > on this North American continent travelling it east to west, north to south. > > On foreign assignments one is far more alert and aware of new locals and > things than walking about their home town. Sure we should be just as alert > to the home brew as the foreign, but it just doesn't work that way. - -- Nathan Wajsman Herrliberg (ZH), Switzerland e-mail: wajsman@webshuttle.ch Photo-A-Week: http://www.wajsman.com/indexpaw2002.htm General photo site: http://www.wajsman.com/index.htm - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html