Hat/No Hat

Photographing people on the street who are wearing hats poses a very specific set of difficulties. I wear hats all the time when I'm out. I especially like wearing panama hats, so when I see a guy wearing a straw hat I immediately take notice. On very sunny days, if the hat is doing its job, the face will be in shadow, often very deep. Sometimes the light reflected off the ground will add some brightness, but for this shot, taken on Central Park South, it was no help at all. With some careful dodging and burning using Nik Software's Viveza 2, Color Efex Pro 4, and Silver Efex Pro 2 it was possible to get a good balance of light and shadow here.

 

After processing the image in Photoshop and saving it back to my Lightroom catalog, when I opened my Lightroom window to rename the image, it appeared in the grid view next to this next image which was shot in Times Square on the same day as the first image. It was just a coincidence, but I realized what a great coupling these two images made. Shazam!!

Fujinon 14mm Lens - Hoping and Waiting

Here's two examples of why the Funinon 18mm lens is just not quite wide enough. I was very close to both of these people when I took the shot. The expression in the first image happened because I was close enough for the man to react to me, but too close to get the top of his head. A little tilt up would have gotten that, but then I would have lost some of the image detail at the bottom, and that line of the edge of the planter is important to balance the line in the street to the man's left. At a 35mm equivalent, the 18mm is actually a 28mm lens. The 14mm would be a 21 mm equivalent. When I was shooting with my Leicas, I always had the 21mm f2.8 lens and 21mm viewfinder on my M4. I swapped lenses only on my M6.

With the wide angle 14mm lens on my X-Pro1 I would have been able to get more of the street scene unfolding around this unhappy woman. I think the image works as it is, but I would have been more satisfied to have more of the man on the right in the frame. 

In any case, the image quality of the Fuji 18mm lens is outstanding, comparable to anything I could have gotten with my Leica glass on the XP1, and better than what I could have gotten with Leica glass on my M6 shooting Fuji Neopan 400 film.

On the Corner

Shooting with the Fuji X-Pro1 makes me feel like a kid again. It's just so much damned fun to play with! I've gotten stuck in a rut with it, though. The 18mm Fujinon lens fits my style of shooting and is on the camera 98% of the time. 

Yesterday I was sitting on the wall at the Apple Store plaza on 58th street and Fifth Avenue, watching all the girls go by (Brother you can't go to jail for what your thinking, or for the woo look in your eye). Just for a change I switched over to the Fujinon 35mm lens, which got me a lot closer to my subjects than I am used to. It was a challenge to get the framing right. Bringing the subject so much closer adds an intensity to the image but also creates some difficulties in how to use surrounding figures and lines to support the composition. 

Oh well, I guess I'll just have to go out and play (oops, I meant practice) with my toys a lot more. 

The Story

Firstly, just a quick comment about my website. Work is progressing nicely on the redesign. But it is so so tedious. The new design will present the images in a much larger format, and the overall layout of the design will be scalable for mobile devices. I haven't yet gotten one of those modern miracles - I do not suffer (too much) from GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) but I'm hoping that the anticipated arrival of the Apple 7" iPad which is due this September will be too attractive to ignore.

Okay now back to important stuff - pictures and stories. One of my fondest memories as a child was the strong presence in my life of my grandparents on both sides of my family. I cherish the memories of the warm loving times I spent alone with them. Listening to their stories told with heavy East European/Yiddish accents was like being deeply immersed in a fantasy world. Now that I'm on the other end of the time line, when I see a scene such as this it immediately brings me back to those times over 60 years ago. 

This shot was taken on Broadway near Lincoln Center. There wasn't much space between me and the scene as it unfolded, but I wanted to not intrude upon the moment. I shot it with the Fuji 18mm (28mm equivalent) lens. 

Apologies

My apologies to my many followers and readers of this blog. I've been hard at work in a redesign for my portfolio website to make it compatible with mobile devises, and to make the image size 'scalable'. When it's done the website name (URL) will stay the same, and the new site will magically appear (if I ever finish regenerating all the images and adding all the captions and stuff).

The redesign has given me the opportunity to re-evaluate my portfolio structure and to edit down the material. This is a good thing. The site was getting unwieldy. Hopefully, when it's all done, the photo presentation will be better than ever.

Evolving Style

When I started with digital photography I shot mostly color images. At the time there were limited means to convert a color raw file into an acceptable b/w image. I tried to emulate the look and feel I had created when I was printing in my 'wet' darkroom, but I just couldn't get it. I tried desaturating the color in Lightroom. I tried various means within Photoshop - guided by digital gurus - but I got too deeply tangled in technique and became frustrated at not getting the results for which I was looking.  And then I discovered Nik Software - in particular Silver Efex Pro. I felt at home with it because the control the software afforded me enabled me to bypass digital tricks and manipulations and to work intuitively as I had learned to do with an enlarger, chemicals, and silver gelatin paper. The software translated the adjustments from the controls in the interface into digital magic that did what I expected the controls to do. With Silver Efex Pro I could recreate, and even surpass, what I had done in the darkroom.

Then came Silver Efex Pro 2. The new digital controls allowed for more than I ever could have accomplished in my analog processing. So I went a little crazy with it. I went overboard and over-processed my images, posted them on a photo website every day, and the feedback I received was very gratifying. I liked hearing people tell me that my images were instantly recognizable. I had arrived.

But the processing fast became formulaic.  I have no prejudice against HDR processing. I enjoy playing with it sometimes just to take a break from the intensity of feeling I invest in my street work. For a few months, when I first started using Nik's HDR Efex Pro package, I became fascinated with urban exploration (urbex). I spent quite a bit of time hunting down areas of urban decay, shlepped a tripod with me to shoot bracketed exposures, and experimented with the style and subject. When I got back to my b/w work, it had a look that seemed imitate an HDR quality. I often got comments like 'nice b/w HDR', to which I felt impelled to respond 'It's NOT HDR!' I needed to move away from that look. My strongest motivation to create b/w images was to focus the viewer's attention on the characters and feelings, but people were noticing the processing more than the content in the image.

So my style continued to evolve and I have arrived at what I feel, for the present time anyway, best focuses the viewer's attention where I want it. The style is most evident in my most recent previous posts here, here, and here. There's a simple straightforwardness to those images that allows the expression of the subject to dictate the story of the moment - and, as I so often write, my images are all about story and feelings.

I regressed a bit to my previous style for this shot. I thought it would best capture the levity of the moment. A second before I took this frame the two gentlemen played a playful practical joke on the young lady. I wish I could have gotten that shot too, but it happened way too fast. I titled this shot 'Yeah, you laughin' now .....' (the implied message is 'but wait till tonight when you wanna snuggle up to me!').

What's in a story

Stories are the way we pass on our history and traditions, the way we communicate literally or figuratively, and it's that capacity for communicating through stories that make humans special. The retelling of complex myths is as old as our capacity for language communication. But our ability to tell stories through visual images may very well predate that. 

The beauty of non-verbal story telling - as in visual or musical images - is the capacity to speak from heart to heart, mind to mind, without the need for verbal sounds with connotative meaning. There's an ambiguity which allows for the free flow of feelings - the investment of empathy and intuition by the artist, to be interpreted by how the viewer perceives. Without that investment, an image or creation is merely a technical exercise. 

Walking down Madison Avenue this past Saturday amongst the parade of fine clothes, elegant automobiles, and delightfully scented women (dressed in my street photographer's mufti of nondescript, ever-so-slightly shabby clothes) I walked past a café with tables extending out onto the sidewalk. There sat a very prim matronly woman who, when she saw me approaching, sniffed condescendingly and turned away. She was the queen of sanctimony.