Then there's the lack of a top screen to give me the info I like to have to hand - shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I know it's all there on the big screen or in the electronic viewfinder - but I don't see it. Those screens are for composing pictures with. Mentally I block all the letters, icons and numbers out. As a result I end up shooting with crap settings and getting crap pictures.
Today's unplanned wander round Preston market was a case in point. I was sure I'd dialled the aperture back to f2 - which would ghave given me a fast enough shutter speed to combat wobbly hand syndrome when shooting single handed using the rear screen. I normally prefer using a viewfinder, but there's something about using a compact which makes me want to poke the camera into corners to get angles of view I couldn't by using the viewfinder. It also allows you to take photographs of people unaware the camera is actually aimed at them. Sometimes! So, I ended up with a load of slightly blurred pictures.
The market isn't what it used to be, at least not today. Maybe on a Saturday it has more traditional stalls, but Thursday is more of a car boot sale. Lots of interesting junk to look at, and strange juxtapositions of objects though. At the time I wasn't sure what caught my eye about the taps in the picture below. Processing it I realised that it was the echo of the arches in the background. That's why I cropped the top of the frame to a 3:2 aspect ratio. Useful as the 4:3 ratio is for some things (portrait oriented for example, and certain landscape subjects) I feel stuck in the old 35mm format, particularly for this kind of stuff. The B+W conversions are mostly to compensate for the blurriness. A grungy 'street photography' look where technical flaws become positives!
For some reason I've been pondering recently if the internet is debasing 'street photography'. Just like landscapes streets are available to anyone. I think this is why they are popular subjects among hobbyist photographers. As such common subjects, themes, compositions, and treatments in these genres get repeated. For many it's enough to photograph Corfe Castle or Durdle Door. It doesn't matter that they do so in exactly the same way everyone else has done before them. They've pretty much has teh compopsition handed them on a plate. With street photography people and things move, that's why good street photographs work - they've frozen a number of elements in a never to be repeated arrangement. That's more opf a challenge. As a result it's become enough to take photographs on the street and give them the 'look' of the 'iconic' street images. Shoot in black and white, use a lens no longer than 50mm and you're half way there.
By that score these pictures are 'internet street'. There are millions of such uninteresting pictures on the internet. Flickr is full of them, people have blogs with nothing but them filling their posts. Some even run workshops teaching others how to produce even more of them. I'm sure the interest in street photography has been driven by the web. It looks easy. It is just pictures of people in the street. Except, when done well, it's not.
I've been thinking about black and white these last few days too. I think it should be outlawed. Sure, colour can get in the way of some pictures. It can, perhaps surprisingly, make pictures look too ordinary. One of the strengths of great photographs is often their ability to render the everyday truly extraordinary. Colour can make it mundane. But just because colour adds an extra difficulty to picture making it can also be crucial. This shot is okay in an 'internet street' sort of way as a monochrome image. But it was colour that made me take it in the first place.
The stress on the subject matter shifts when it's shown in colour. In black and white the eye is drawn to the woman, in colour there's a tension between the attraction to a human face and the brightly coloured soft fabric flower. The picture works differently.
The most interesting stall by far was the one selling (and buying) second hand film cameras and other gear. Luckily for me I was short of cash or I might have come home with another camera to put one roll of film through and abandon. That Nikon was tempting!
Given the assortment of junk on show there was a lot that could be done with colour and shapes. Santa Claus and the Twin Towers? There has to be a deeper meaning there! This picture needs colour.Prior to visiting the market I had tried to make a 'serious' picture of what the Americans would call 'a vacant lot' as part of my loose Spaces series.I spent some time framing different views and taking care over the camera settings. I got a couple of frames which looked okay on the back of the camera.
On the PC it was different story. The limitations of the camera, which I was aware of, were all too obvious. Distortion and colour fringing. Easily corrected in Lightroom, but annoying. I especially despise correcting lens distortion as it buggers up critically composed pictures by chopping bits off at the edge.
As a fishing camera, and for casual shooting, the compact is fine. I expect limitations. It's not the camera that's the problem. It's me. My habit of seeing 'serious' pictures when I'm just messing about snapshooting and don't have the right gear with me. Rather than leave the picture untaken - which, I suspect, is the correct approach - I waste time doing what I can with what I have available and then regret it when I get home. perhaps I ought to get one of those new fangled phone camera thingies to remove the temptation rather than continue the futile search for my perfect go-anywhere-do-everything camera? Whatever the case I've got to give up trying to do stuff which the cameras aren't intended to do.
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