Echo Park 2010
Camera: Kodak Bulls-Eye
Film: Arista 400 B&W 120mm
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I find there aren’t many books out there which handle the realistic side of street photography in great details and offer any form of useful information. Maybe that’s why I get plenty of emails asking me for such practical advice regarding street photography and quite often asking me about, you guessed it, photographing strangers.
One of my weaknesses in life is books, and especially old books, so sometimes when I come across an old photography book in a thrift store or a garage sale, I just have to have it, even though I’m quickly running out of shelf space.
Such a thrift store find is a photography book I got recently for a $1.50. It is a book published by Kodak in 1984 titled “Photographing the drama of daily life”.
It has some really fun street images and several useful ideas to go with these images.
Here are a few good suggestions from the chapter – Dealing with people:
“The most completely candid photographs are taken without the subject’s knowledge. …More often you will need some degree of cooperation from people to obtain a satisfying result. In most circumstances, a friendly manner and a smile will do the trick. If you look solemn, people may start to wonder just why you are photographing them whereas a smile can disarm their anxieties and help to put them at ease.
…Legally, you do not need to seek permission from people you want to photograph in public places if the pictures are for personal, editorial, or exhibition use rather than for a commercial purpose such as advertising (when written permission is required.)
However, judge the situation carefully, do not invade people’s privacy and be ready to diffuse things with charm and tact.”
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The third day turned out to be a race to visit America’s historic Triangle – Jamestown, Yorktown and Wiliamsburg. You end up with a little bit of each. which is great. I’m not a big fan of museums, guided tours or staring at artifacts inside glass cases. but here you can get a detour from the usual tired museum type visit and check out the real thing; Walk around the actual first British settlement in north America (It was a sad start), climb the trenches the American’s built under the commend of George Washington in Yorktown (the last battle of the Revolution) and go for a night stroll in Colonial Williamsburg when the place is already dark and quiet and most of the colonial wannabes left the place by now.
And then you go to Aroma in Williamsburg, a cafe that offers not only wonderful food but a young and alive atmosphere you can only find in a cafe near by a local college (William & Mary college).
This is where this picture was taken:
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I’m in a process of putting together ideas and plans, much like a blueprint, for my next book.
The book will include some thoughts about street photography and many of the techniques I use in photography; some that are featured in my last book (I am not an artist) and a bunch of new ones.
If there is something you want to see in the book, if there is a technique you think needs further explanation or if you have any other suggestion, I would love to here from you.
You can leave a comment here or if you want it to be private you can contact me directly.
Btw, You will find most of the techniques I use featured in this blog, here to the right under “Categories”. A list of the chapters and techniques in my last book is available on this page (on the right).
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I came across this picture while looking at my old photoblog. I think I took it around 2002, when I was young and beautiful.
It is one of these pictures that will always keep me wondering; What was this interesting group of women doing together in this room? Ah, I’ll probably never know.
And that’s, ladies and gentlemen, the beauty of street photography!
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Though some people believe shooting expired film is a crime against photography, I was always a big fan of the unique and unexpected results of the long-expired film!
It’s the extra grain, and the softness, the dark edges, and if you’re really lucky you get some real fading and other beautiful signs of aging (just like wrinkles).
girl and a puppy. 3rd street promenade. June 2009.
camera: Olympus 35RC.
Film: Ilford HP5 400 ASA
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Picture shot on Kodak T400cn. I love this film. I love it because it is quite an unusual film.
It is a black and white film but it is designed for processing in C-41 color negative process.
It can then be printed either on black & white paper or on color paper.
The problem with this film is that it had been discontinued a few years ago. The good news is that I found 5 rolls of this film in the Expired Film bag that resides in my fridge. And the other good news is that this film did not just vanish but it was replaced with another similar film: Kodak Professional BW400CN. It’s definitely on my list of things to try out someday.
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Here’s a new printing technique I tried out yesterday and certainly loved the output.
It is quite simple to do:
I chose to use a vellum printing paper for this task.
Since Vellum paper is translucent I printed a black and white photo of Capitol Records building after I enhanced the contrast a bit.
After a few minutes the ink was dry and I placed the paper back in the printer but this time I made sure to print a second image, an abstract background in this case, on the other side of the paper.
This creates a nice layer effect when one of the sides is sharp and the other is faded, depend on which side you are looking at the printout from. In this case I scanned the Capitol Records photo in the foreground.
It is obviously a very easy printing technique and the only real dilemma is which photos or images to use.
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If you have a blog, or a message board, or a guest book, you probably had to install something against spam. For obvious reasons, blogs and other types of community sites with user participation are a great attraction to these scam bags.
The reason spammers choose to overflow other sites with their links is that the existence of these links, even if nobody actually clicks them, increases their artificial search engine ranking.
Before I began this blog I installed a street photography forum on my site which was a nice place for street photographers to talk about related issues and review each other photos.
But very quickly the spam robots discovered this forum and began posting their links in the older discussion threads. Back then the anti-spam practice was to ban ip addresses and certain key words but other than that there was nothing much to do.
Minolta SRT 101 . Kodak T400 CN BW film . Malibu 2009
Now days it is much easier to prevent spam in comments.
There are many ways to fight spam like installing automated spam detectors, rejecting links in posts, members participation only, using the “nofollow” tag (which in my opinion is not at all effective), and of course the most irritating anti-spam method; the CAPTCHA. This is when you need to validate your message by entering a combination of letters and numbers before you can post your comment.
Needless to say that this method tends to get on everybody’s nerves when so often the letters are impossible to read that it takes a few tries before the form is finally submitted.
When I installed my blog I made sure to add an anti-spam plugin called Akismet, which works just fine. It always finds the spam and leaves it in a folder on the server for me to go over and make sure it is all spam alright. Until recently, I didn’t mind checking this spam folder every once in a while and deleting the spam, but suddenly there are more and more spam comments and going over the spam folder became more time consuming.
So I decided to simply install another plugin which requires the posters to review their posts before they submit them. It is a very simple fix but quite smart. It lets people review their comments and at the same time it prevents the automated spam comments from being posted.
So far, in the last couple of weeks there were no comments in the spam folder. It is empty.
Seems like problem solved.
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