Waiting for the Fujinon 14mm Lens

The new Fuji 14mm f2.8 lens is being shipped by Fuji, and deliveries in the New York area are expected to begin next week. I'm looking forward to hitting the streets with it. The full frame equivalent focal length is 21mm, and that was my favorite lens with which to shoot using my Leica M6 (back in the day). The 18mm prime and the 18mm of the zoom lens have been adequate up to now, but have always felt just a little too narrow at the 28mm equivalent. I'm hoping the 14mm lens will give me the flexibility to be able to get in really close, as shooting on the streets of New York often requires, and still leave me space enough around the subjects for minor cropping if necessary.

While I wait out this extremely cold spell, and impatiently anticipate the delivery of the new lens, here's a couple of shots from last week taken from on one of my favorite shooting spots in Manhattan:

 m

Another street face

Way too cold to be out shooting this week. I'm going through street withdrawal. This shot is a leftover from a walk on Canal Street last week. Enjoy.

Street Faces

I don't have any set agenda when I hit the street. Quite often I have no idea until I walk out of Penn Station where I am headed. Could be Chinatown, Little Italy, Tribeca, Chelsea, or someplace in midtown. Some days I look for a particular setting, settle in, and wait for the actors to appear on stage. Then again, some times I roam around looking for interesting situations. Lately, when I'm out shooting, I've been most attracted to street portraits - an interesting face that tells the story of life, a look towards me with some feeling in it ..... if a subject sees me aiming the lens at them, I usually get some kind of response - not always pleasant, but at least honest.

Here's a collection of looks I grabbed over the past few days. You can make up your own stories about them.

Prince Street Doo Wop

Treasures abound on the streets of SoHo in New York City. It's not unusual to find a group of musicians busking on a side street, but this past Saturday there were three groups at different locations. I'd never seen nor heard Select Blendz. Their sound was quite refreshingly different - a mix of soul, blues, and doo wop. And their choreography and body expressions made watching them perform totally entertaining. I wish you could hear the music they made.

Saturday Photo Walk

Saturday was an unusually warm January day for New York. I walked from Canal Street through Little Italy, SoHo, Greenwich Village, and up to Penn Station. I had the opportunity to engage a panoply of characters shooting both anonymously and engaging the people in conversation. On Prince Street in SoHo I listened to a quartet of men, accompanied by guitar and bass, sing a mixture of doo-wop and blues songs - those photos to follow later this week.

I did more experimenting with the Fuji Optical Image Stabilization and I think I finally came to a reasonable understanding of how to use it effectively and not run down my battery power too quickly.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, there are two settings for the OIS - for continuous and intermittent engagement. I much prefer the continuous mode, as it provides a much quicker response. There's a switch on the 18-55mm zoom lens which allows for turning the OIS on and off. Since my usual mode of shooting is with a shutter speed of 1/250th second, I can disable the OIS so it's not sucking up battery power. When the ambient light shifts so that I have to use a slower shutter speed - 1/125th second or slower - I flip the switch to engage the OIS and I'm good down to 1/30th second. 

Chillin' on Grand Street

Puffing away on Prince Street

Fuji X-Pro1 Crispy Clean

At the beginning of January I posted an entry of what I thought were my ten best shots of the year 2012. You can revisit that entry here. Jim Goldstein of JMG-Galleries asked for the photographic community to submit entries of blog posts, flicker albums, etc. to be considered for a listing of posts of the entrants' ten best shots. The results were posted today here on Jim's blog. There are three hundred listings, and I'm honored to have had my blogpost included (#114). Jim highlighted a number of those entries (with three asterisks - ***) on the list of those he found most interesting, a group in which my entry was included. Again, honored to be included in such a select and accomplished group of photographers.

A list of three hundred links is a lot of material to digest. So far I've gone through those that Jim highlighted and have come away with some thoughts I'd like to pose. There are many types of photography represented that cover a very broad range of subject material. To do any of them well requires hard work, technical expertise, insight, and an artistic sensitivity. All those that were highlighted exhibited all of that. The material on many of the sites I viewed so far was of landscape, nature, and architecture. Also much of the material was of exotic locales. And almost all of the photography was in color.

Why do I shoot what I do? I love a beautiful scenic landscape - to look at, enjoy, and feel a spiritual connection with nature, but if there isn't a person in the scene, I don't feel any compunction to take a photo. I love to travel - new places, exotic or not, offer new insights and new culture, but I don't have to travel hundreds of miles somewhere to find an interesting person or situation to capture - fifteen miles to New York City is far enough for me. I love the stimulation of color something as complex and deep as a work of art, or something as ubiquitous as a street scene, but the color images I capture don't really begin to sing to me until I begin the conversion to tones of black, white, and gray.

Something as mundane as a scrubby bearded guy with a silly winter hat walking with intense purpose makes my shutter finger itch, brings a twinkle to my camera eye, and connects me to every average person walking on any street anyplace I have my camera with me.

Five from the weekend

Shooting on the streets of New York during the winter presents a number of challenges. People are wrapped up in layers of clothes - coats, scarves, earmuffs, hats - and it's tough to get a clear shot of a good facial expression. Shooting from eye level will usually result in a shot with the eyes in deep shadows strong reflections from the lenses of sunglasses. Changing the position of the camera to mid chest level can make a big difference. 

Depending on the situation I might try for direct eye contact which, if I'm shooting from the hip, would result in the subject looking at me rather than into the lens of the camera. 

 

Sometimes the subject looks directly into the lens to see if there's some indication of the shot being taken (which, with the X-Pro1, there isn't).

Sometimes the subject is oblivious of my presence. 

And then there's those times when I get caught redhanded taking a shot to which the subject objects.
Oh well, that's street photography. Have to learn to deal with it.