It has been very long since I’ve posted anything (minus my last post – after almost 7 months!), to say the least. I really don’t know why that happened even when I had so much going on, photography wise. But before that, I was completely neglecting photography. I literally had to blow dust off my poor D90.
Soon after writing the 7 month old post, I just sort of stopped using my camera. I hardly had time to get out and shoot. And when I did have the time, I would watch television or play Call Of Duty instead of using my camera. It didn’t matter to me at first. I sort of gave up on photography. But, out of nowhere, I became extremely frustrated with myself for letting my passion die.
The first thing I tried doing was to change my style a bit. Event photography and all that commercial nonsense that I wanted to get into just stopped appealing to me. Fine art and street photography gained my interest and I tried to get more technical with my camera instead of Photoshop or Lightroom (that said, I did make a few serious attempts at HDR photography – not in the usual overdone, unrealistic fashion but more with the idea of what the human eye would see). I also started to try and frame the photograph as well as I could within the camera instead of cropping it later. I realised how little I paid attention to the overall composition of the photograph and forcing myself to stop cropping has really started to help me create much better composed photographs than I did before (in my opinion). Although with the D90, always getting the right composition isn’t always possible since it doesn’t have a 100% viewfinder and I’m still getting used to the viewfinder crop (these little changes in my shooting style have made me start from scratch, which is a good thing).
A picture from my first real attempt at street photography
So, with my new angle towards photography, I started paying more attention to the photograph I was about to take. Along with really thinking about my composition, I tried to evaluate the exposure (even with the correct metering, there’s, more often than not, some fault) as accurately as possible so that the picture was ready to be shown with very little or no post adjustments at all. All this thinking and planning also stopped me from over shooting, which I used to do a lot (I’m sure both my camera and computer thank me for that).
Like I said before, I’ve also gained quite a bit of interest in street photography. The thought of capturing that “decisive moment”, that one moment in daily life that will never occur again, was just too good to pass up without a serious attempt. So, after reading up on the basics concepts and ideas of street photography from various blogs like www.erickimphotography.com and www.85mm.ch (by the way, if you’re into street photography even a little bit or just want to see what the fuss is all about, be sure to check out both these sites. Both, Thomas Leuthard (85mm) and Eric Kim are geniuses behind the camera and also very generous guys who share their knowledge for free and through workshops. Plus Thomas Leuthard has got excellent ebooks for free download on his site – get them by clicking here), I grabbed my D90, slapped on a 28mm f/2.8D prime on it and went into the streets of Melbourne‘s CBD without any real idea of what I was going to shoot. I did that deliberately just so that I could get a feel of what I was up against. And to be honest, the streets intimidated me like anything before. But I started shooting anyway. I was shooting random people. With hardly any thought given to composition or anything else other than the exposure. Needless to say, all the 150ish photographs were absolutely crap.
Patience is not a trait found in my personality. And it was because of this that I decided to hit the streets after reading only a few blog posts. Little did I know that street shooting was far less complicated that I had imagined it to be. As far as the camera settings are concerned, just set it in Aperture priority, set a mid range-ish aperture, set the ISO depending on the light (or leave that in ‘Auto’ as well) and you’re set. I had my camera on manual the first time and spent almost the first 45 minutes trying to figure out the right settings since the light is almost always different in different places. I was too worried about the exposure setting than anything else. In street shooting, composition is key. Let the camera worry about everything else.
Coming back to the matter of patience, you need bucket loads of it in street shooting. I’ve realised that now – somedays you may get 5 or 6 amazing shots, other days, you may not get even one. One needs to be patient and wait for it to come to you. You will never get the composition you want when you hunt for it.
The other thing that I’ve derived from my, now, massive library of ebooks and documentaries on street shooting is that almost everyone says something or the other that is loosely or directly related to the quote by legendary photojournalist, Robert Capa, “If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.” While that may be true around 80% of the time, one doesn’t always need to get in their subjects’ face. I will admit, getting as close as Robert Capa requires some major cojones and does yield some spectacular results, I just simply can’t get that close (for now). Now, look at the guy who practically invented street shooting, Henri Cartier – Bresson (nothing even remotely related to street shooting is complete without the mention of his name). He did get close but when he talks about street shooting, he talks about geometry. And that’s the style I want to develop. I know it’s not very original of me, but at least I have a direction till the time I try out different things and determine my personal style.
To force myself to be patient and not over-shoot, I got a smaller memory card for the D90 (I normally have a 16gb card but I opted for a 2gb card for this exercise). I did stop but I still took a few useless images that I simply deleted when I ran out of memory. To completely cure myself of the impatience, I shelved my D90 again and recently bought a 52 year old Minolta Uniomat 35 rangefinder camera. Mainly because I’ve wanted to try a rangefinder system for a very long time and also because you can’t review/delete your pictures when shooting film. You have make every shot count. I haven’t done much street shooting with the Minolta as yet but the number of times that I have been out with it, I’ve only had the roll that was already inside it and, to make things even more challenging, never carried any extra film.
This all said, I have been using my D90 for other stuff that’s beginning to interest me; star trails and time-lapse photography. I’ve done two attempts at this till now (mainly because we haven’t had a clear night sky for over a month here in Melbourne. Clouds just have to show up at the wrong time!).
My first attempt at star trail photography.
Anyway, this has been a concise version of what I have been up to lately. I concentrating more on film photography, so my next post is going to be focused on my first few attempts at film photography (rangefinder and film, both are firsts for me).
Stay tuned!
Related articles
- Henri Cartier-Bresson L’amour tout court Part1 (manonmona.wordpress.com)
- The year in street photography (klarayoon.wordpress.com)
- A little treat for myself (hibrahimphotography.wordpress.com)
- Street Photography in 2012 (stephentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
hasan ibrahim | Photography 