Who Knew?

We (photographers or not) are often our own worst critics and editors.

The image above was loaded yesterday to my 500px account, started late last month. 

I decided to add another web presence as any website follows a pretty slow growth path and the more aggressive social gallery sites help get your images onto more screens.

The image above was taken late in the evening on our first trip to Japan last (their) spring. I liked the idea of taking it. I liked the success I achieved when taking it, but ultimately the image failed to inspire after an initial period in the sun.

I cannot say with any certainty what was wrong with it, but candidates are the slight (corrected) wide angle distortion, the slightly cramped feel, the coat corner invading the edge, the cold pinkish hue from wet evening city light (hence the conversion to mono) or the slight softness from the slow shutter speed/wide aperture combination?

Some of the images from the trip ended up being converted to black and white and added to the Traveller series. This one still loitered in the relegation zone. Finally, after most of the other images had been loaded I decided to give it a go in the last batch. 

It's now my most liked image on 500px and it has been on the shortest time of the top 10!

With one exception the other images featured are not my favourites. What do I know? Obviously not as much as I thought. Might go trawling the "crappy" files. 

Weather is

The Japanese have a saying, "weather is". 

They have a very accepting and philosophical nature. If it rains, they don't complain, you just use and umbrella or get wet. Simple, no fuss. But on the other hand that can create a mentality of "be ready for anything". Tokyo can dish up some pretty serious rain (we have only been there a few days with glorious weather, the majority of days in spring were wet and about half in the  summer trip, it took four trips to Harajuku to get sunshine). The sun is mild by Australian standards, but the heat and humidity can be intense, so a brolly serves dual roles.

The girl above makes an almost pointless study of the weather as she is equally prepared for either extreme. There may be an element of fashion driving her choices also!

The camera was the OMD EM5 and the lens, the 75mm at f4. The width of the streets in Tokyo and Osaka allow a lovely distance for photos with a short telephoto lens.

Second visits

Florence, centre of the artistic world, cradle or Italian medieval history.

On our first visit we hated it.

My wife and my memories of Florence on our first visit are a mix of heat, dust, bad smells and getting lost (a lot). Roses were covered in a fine dust, the sun became a burning pink ball each evening, we witnessed the collapse and imminent death of a tourist, a messy moped accident resulting in a broken arm that still managed to be waved about in conversation, warm pools of urine (human or horse, not sure) and the most frustrating map I have ever used (all of the marked streets were the same size, from two lane roads to cramped alleyways). 

It did not help that on the night of our arrival we wandered into the market area around dusk, entering a seedy world of hawkers, beggars, dodgy looking types and market stall holders at the end of a long day. This was the only time in our trip we felt genuinely skittish.

Contrast this with our arrival in Seina in the middle of a medieval festival, complete with parades and a race through the Piazzo Del Compo to see who will ride in the Palio. It was a furious and thrilling first two hours until the clouds burst clearing the piazzo in seconds!

Porcellino, the enormous brass bore in the market area has a shiny nose from being rubbed by tourists. Apparently if you rub it you will return. "Touch that and you are coming back on your own" my wife said and she meant it.

Oddly, many of my favourite images from that trip came from Florence and it was one of the better hotels we stayed in, although not great. The worst hotel was in Siena, but we have much better memories of that city, go figure.

The second trip in winter a few years later could not have been more different. Our hotel was an off season revelation, the people were softer, even in the market area (the global down turn humbled many) and soft rain cleaned the streets, as did the police, seemingly less tolerant of corner hawkers. 

We did not rub Porcellinos' nose, but we came back anyway. An open mind really can open new (or old) doors. 

Double Talk

Where would the Italians be without their hands? A bit pointless on the phone, but it's in their blood.

This is one of my favourite images from our trip to Italy in 2012(?). I initially preferred the colour image, but over time, the black and white won me over. Wonderful character and emotion.

Camera was the 450D canon and the lens the 135 f2L. This combination worked well enough in it's day and I still miss the lens (although the 75mm Olympus is more useful and maybe a little better at half the size). This may be an odd combination to some, but weight was really an issue with those big canon lenses, so light weight cameras were the best (only) solution.

Here is the colour one for comparison, although it is a little lighter than earlier versions.

In Japan They Don't Smile

If you have ever heard that in Japan the people do not show emotion, you have been miss informed.

Looking through my images from the two trips to Japan, I noticed something that had been observed before, but became stark in contrast to other images I had been looking at earlier the same day. There are a lot more images containing strong emotions, especially happiness in these photos, a lot more than my collection of street shots from Italy or Australia. It is not uncommon to see Japanese people sharing moments of shared joy, especially with their children, but even then they keep these to themselves out of respect to others. Perfect really.

Shooting street images in Japan is easier than in many countries, but the image maker must beware. The people have a strong tolerance to the behaviour of others, but that does not mean they do not feel intruded upon. Respect, distance and common decency are all as relevant there as anywhere else.  

Testing times

Poor Pepper (or Miss Daisy as we sometimes call her).

My obsessive testing regime needs consistency, so poor Pep has been my muse for the last few years. I don't think dogs can roll their eyes, but if they have an equivalent, I reckon I cop it a lot.

This image came from my slightly manic "Lets go back to full frame Canon" period. After shooting various subjects for a weekend with a 6D, EM5 and XE-1, I had convinced myself I needed full frame again. In my last test the strong afternoon light through our bedroom window and a content, sun chasing hound allowed just one more test to confirm my move.

It back fired brilliantly.

I fired off about 10 properly aimed shots with the 6D and an 85 f1.8 and then grudgingly about the same with the OMD and various lenses, all wide open. On inspecting the images, the Canon's shots missed focus and showed twitchy exposure more often than not. Much as I had been expecting, but avoiding in my previous tests, but still the results rattled me. Looking at the Olympus images, I was bemused, but not surprised that all of the images, regardless of lens, had focussed on the eye. The depth of field at f1.8 was more forgiving, the lenses were sharper and the odd exposure miss cue was salvageable and fully avoidable (I was being lazy to the point of unfair to the Olympus, shooting one handed while holding the Canon in the other hand and not "pre chimping" as I had pretty much made up my mind to move on).

The bit of fringing on the collar disc is not "CA", but a greenish colour cast by a slightly tinted, hardened glass window (it is in every shot to some extent, often showing up in fine hair highlights). The chosen shot was taken with the EM5 (stay of execution) and the amazing 75 f1.8.

This image has been enlarged to 20"x30" and still has plenty of legs (you can clearly count the hairs in her top eye lid). Bye bye full frame. 

Of the images below, the middle one is the original file before a bit of post processing. The one on the left is with the 25mm showing colour consistency.

Journeys

On one of my photo walks this morning I chanced upon an image that is more mystery than story.

My home town has become a new home for a lot of people from around the world with stories far more interesting, horrifying and emotional than anything I have lived through. Looking at this mans hands is like looking at a book cover, without the ability to read the pages. I hope he finds safety, happiness and a future here, things I take for granted. 

A Rainy Day With Creepy Crawlies

Out of my comfort zone today in more ways than one.

My father in law John runs a website dedicated to the spiders of Tasmania and has even written a book on the subject called "Webs" and that gets him in contact with many other lovers of wild things like Patrick, who's property we visited today. Hanging around with him to "take some pics" usually involves more than a little suppressed fear of these eight legged wonders of the insect world. It's funny how the more you learn the less you fear. There is a lesson in that I am sure, but that does not help when you feel something tickling your leg (usually a spike of grass, but not always!). Some of these Orb spiders are about the size of a 10 cent coin. The odd green speckled web is a Russian Tent spider and the skinny guy is the male of the species shown centre bottom and centre left. John managed to bag a few shots of some spiders even he had not seen in the wild before. All this was in one large back garden and there was a lot more! Getting there was a bit over an hour, but our trip home ended up being well over two hours due to some amazing torrential rain, road accidents and detours. Quite a day.

My technique is nothing special for this type of work as I deliberately turned my back on true macro work awhile ago, but I managed to cobble together a workable system. The camera was the EM5 as usual, the lens, the 12-40 standard zoom at about f9.5-13 without any other augmentation except some cropping and the standard clip on flash set at about -1 exposure comp. Ok for record shots, but not very creative. John has a very clever set up involving home made ring flashes.

Enlightenment

I spent the morning sitting in on a my first familiarisation day with Darren. We may be going to start a school for photography and today was with our first customer.

Two tutors and one student can get a little intense, so I wandered. The day was held in a park just down the road from where I used to live and I must admit that I never really gave the place any real effort when it was close. The fountain in the middle of the square is well populated with water lilies and although I find them alluring I have also found them frustrating. Photographing things on water often comes down to the quality of the reflections that they cast and the reflections that surround them. Glare, poor quality reflections, and distracting backgrounds tend to lower the value of water images and that was often the case here. This day, the large fountain in the middle of the pond created a deep shadow with just a shaft of light hitting this lily. Some mild post processing was done to remove the odd stray point of light, and whole image was darkened to reveal the detail in the flower, other than that it's much as shot. When you are used to how your cameras' sensor and your post processing will respond to different lighting situations, you can usually depend on the results to be consistently as you expect. The only way to know though is to shoot, look at the results and shoot again. This is why it's important to develop your post processing workflow to be clean, short (less is better) and consistent and to get to know your cameras' patterns of response to different lighting situations* (Ansel Adams would call this "pre visualisation"). Once you get to know what your camera can and can't do, but especially what it does well, your photography can become more deliberately expressive.  When I cut out Canon, Fuji and Sony from my kit, I knew I had sacrificed some looks and capabilities, but I also hoped my awareness of the looks available to me from the Olympus cameras would be sharper. So far I am happy.

* The OMD EM5 mk1 cameras that I use generally take a slightly dark and contrasty image as set. Many users brighten their images a little, but I don't as I prefer the look as it reminds me of very clean, responsive colour slide film (part Kodak, part Fuji). When comparing Olympus to the Fuji rendering, my frustration came from the Olympus cameras inability to get the brilliant "Glassy" look of the Fuji's. After a while I found the look (mostly a product of their jpeg engine) to be a bit fickle and sometimes artificial. I would be known to call the olympus images "dull" or lacking in sparkle. That was a bit unfair as their only crime was accuracy, no Hollywood here, just true to life documentary colour. After some fiddling I found I could also get that brilliant look, within the limits of reasonable accuracy, with my Olympus files.

The Ascendancy of the Ordinary

Sometimes something has really nothing going for it, but it just works.

I like it, you may not, but thats ok. I have been down this laneway on and off for most of my working life (I used to work in the building in another life) and always look for a new angle. It's full of graffiti, that tends to distract and I try to avoid using someone else's art to make my own images. Yesterday day the sky was giving me lots to work with, and it made me look up and see something that had always escaped my notice. 

The cameras was the OMD and the lens, the 25mm f1.8 at f5.6. The 25mm is my "if I only take one lens" lens.

USA Day

Finally made it to USA day.

Can't admit to being much of a car person, but I does like's me shiny things. Always attentive to the proud owners loving remarks, I am lost after the first technical references are made, but no harm done. Most of the images were taken with the OMD and 75-300. Absolutely in it's element with the brilliant sunshine.

Shades

Last Saturday, Meg and I went to the local farmers market. Something we have not been able to do together for the last few years because of work commitments. 

Vowing to take a camera with me everywhere now, I slung an OMD over my shoulder with the 17mm lens attached. This pairing allows me to shoot accurately from the hip, using zone focus* set to about 4 feet, at an aperture from f4 to f8 depending on the light available. The 17mm has the unique ability of extending the perception of depth of field by rendering it's Bokeh more coherently than the current fast drop off/super smooth look that is in fashion (notice the man in the far background). This is an old fashioned design principle, ideal for street photography. The photographer's job with this style is composition, timing and making some effort to keep things straight. With practice, there is little left to luck, but early on there is certainly a lot of frustration. This image is one of two. Both are in focus, but the boys head is turned away in the other image and the woman is partly obscured by another person.

*manual focus preset at a distance using an aperture that will capture a predetermined "zone" of sharpness.

Timing as a friend.

 My wife and I are walkers. We cover dozens of kilometres over our travels, often clocking up 15-20km in a day, just wandering. We like to get the feel of a place and its people by just being around them. We may miss some of the touristy sights, but we would like to think we come back with a different, deeper experience. I think this comes from our first trip away to the recently liberated Czech republic in the early '90's. We stayed with my wife's parents for several weeks living a similar life to the locals. I am pretty sure the roots of both a preferred form of travel and my love of candid documentary (street) photography came from this trip. 

Walking from the Yanaka area to the quiet side of the Imperial palace in Tokyo, we expected to see some of the less well known parts of Tokyo. What we got was a stunning walk through tall, pristine buildings bathed in late afternoon golden light, light traffic and a gentleness, quite odd in any major city.

I am not sure what the large metal tubes are that are found scattered through Japanese cities, but they always catch my eye. This one was the biggest I had seen. The shadow cast on the building behind was perfectly placed, looking almost like a contrasting paint job. 

The camera used was the EM5 and the lens, the 75mm at f5.6. This image really shows off the Olympus "filmy" look. I struggled for a long time choosing between Fuji (glassiness), Canon (colour) and Olympus (sharp, filminess), with a few lapses in discipline. Choosing one brand, based simply on accuracy, reliability and the best system choices (for me) has freed me to get the most out of the look I have available without distractions.

many choices bring indecision, limited choices allow focus.

Salvation

Previously I touched on my use of black and white to salvage a less than ideal file. Trawling through my image bank, I came across this image, taken the trip to Melbourne zoo that was one of two images that gained a life with the switch.

Taken through dirty and flare affected glass, through a lot of low angle sun haze and needing heavy cropping, this image started very humbly. I made the mistake of printing it once on my own printer. There is half a tank of black ink I will never see again, but it came up well enough. The other image in the series is of a grizzled old Lion face taken through a cyclone fence and some tall grass. Unfortunately I only have a print of that one as the original is proving hard to find (I have had hard drive issues in the past, like many). Having the prints though, highlights the need for printing as the only truly viable storage system for your most precious images. 

The camera was the 450d canon and the 400 f5.6L. A great combo in the right conditions.

Making your own luck.

Street photographers do a lot of things to make the most of their luck. Often the best images have a component of luck, made possible by being there and being ready. 

It does not matter how much you prepare though, luck is still the major player. Some streetogs will tell you they can grab "the decisive moment" whenever it presents itself, but to be honest, if you are going for the most spontaneous and natural images you do not have time to think, just react. If the street shooters style involves pre interaction, shock tactics or some staging, then they can probably claim some control, but the old school purists only get a blink to capture their moment.

"All eyes on her" is an image that was captured instinctively, but ended up having more layers than originally thought. The girl's face and her interaction with her father caught my eye and I snapped, nothing unusual there. The TinTin and Scruffy faces on the t shirt and her grand mother (?) also looking straight at her are all added bonuses, strengthening the girl's face as the central subject (talk about leading lines!). Having the vision to see a clever coincidence is a great skill (although the internet is flooded with talented street shooters relying on these shots so I am not sure how much more the genre can take), but I cannot claim this skill. It happens or not, naturally, with effort and preparation.

Technically the image is from the first time I tried zone focus with a 5Dmk2 and a manual focus Voigtlander 40mm lens. The lens allowed me to cradle the enormous camera in one arm and shoot by the markings on the lens at about f8. it was a successful day, but Canon was on the way out with me. I can now get the same result from a camera that looks like a retro SLR or a compact, is quieter and has AF with face detection or MF with markings and is stabilised. 

Memories of William Klein

Style is a fickle and ever evolving thing. It is a product of your vision mixed with the memories of yours and others' work, influence by the times you live in, the limits of available tools and your own practiced experience.

Style, if done right, forms itself from these influences. All you can do is let it. 

I first discovered William Kleins' images in an old Camera and Darkroom magazine (when it was new!). Klein openly broke with convention and said of his own work that it was in a way a manifesto of what not to do by the conventions of his time. His loose and hectic style liberated my own thinking (more often later than at the time), but remained dormant until I discovered street photography.

My own style comes from echoes of past masters, as I suppose do that of many photographers from the film era. They are the culmination of the photographs that have moved me in the past and the feelings they provoked, interpreted in my time with my technique.  Should I take on the work of more recent photographers? I do, but in ever decreasing amounts (I think everyone absorbs more early on in any learning process). At some point in the past my style was formed. It has evolved over time, like everyone's does, but the roots are easy enough to find.

 The image above, taken in dismal weather at a Shibuya train station entrance in Tokyo, is the result of "deliberate randomness". The  17mm was focussed at about 4 foot at f2-4, relying on the unique rendering of the lens to create the anticipated look. The main subject is the "middle distance", not a specific person. The only thing the photographer has to be aware of is timing and composition, very liberating.

The coherently formed, but abstracted girl allows your imagination to tell her story. The sharper, but anonymous man in the foreground adds hard reality and a sense of time, contrasting with the softer main subject. There were a few images taken in that crowded entranceway, but this is my favourite. 

I hope you find your style or already have.

The zoo made me do it

There are lots of arguments for and against black and white images. My choice of black and white is simple, pragmatic and thoroughly unromantic. I choose black and white when colour won't work and mono has the elements it needs.

Each time we visit a major city for any time, the zoo tends to be on the short list. Often the images are a matter of making the best of what you get with mixed light and limited time. After a particularly unsatisfying trip to Melbourne zoo (poor light and time constraints), I struggled with the resulting images and in desperation converted them to mono. It allowed me to salvage some pretty poor files to an acceptable standard. As time went on the black and white zoo series became a thing. Visits became about the images with mono in mind from the outset. Sometimes an image is as good or better in colour, and this leaves me with a dilemma, continue the series or deviate. So far mono has held sway.

The pelican image was captured 10 minutes into a trip to Perth zoo last year. it is not super sharp due to poor light and subject movement and the colour image is cool and flat, but mono allowed the textures, clean lines and personality of the bird to come out. Black and white images have fewer underpinning elements than colour images. They need tone and texture,  subject and compositional strength.

The image was taken with an EM5 and 75-300 lens at 300mm, wide open. the shutter speed was about 1/250, ISO 400. In hindsight a higher ISO would have allowed either a faster shutter speed and/or more depth of field. Removing unwanted clutter from the background also strengthened the image.

Wasted frames

I am forever testing lenses. I used to line up a camera with a book case in our old house and test all of the extremes of focal length, aperture and frame area, turning a chore into a bit of an art form. Lately the method has simplified to just taking some snaps of consistent subjects and viewing at normal size on a biggish screen. A waste of a frame really.

Poor Pepper or, as we also call her "Miss Daisy" has been my muse for the last few years since we adopted her from my brother in law. She is very photogenic, patient and has reliable habits as she wanders from room to room following the sun. This day I had the 75-300 in hand and noticed her winding up for a bark at a passing dog. The shot was the usual, aim for the eyes (Olympus eye detect works on dogs!), hold steady and shoot. The result is an image nearly impossible only a few years ago. A hand held 600mm equivalent focal length, indoors in fading light at ISO 400 and a slightly moving subject. The aperture is f6.7 (wide open on that lens and apparently its weakest point...hah!) and the shutter speed was about 1/60-1/125 of a second. IBIS on even the older EM5 is good enough that sometimes you forget old habits and try improbable shots. 

Conflicting emotions

One of the main draws of street photography is observing the interaction of people in their world. Going about their business with little or no awareness of a quiet observer, they show you the faces that often only close family and friends see.

In the same style as the last posting, this photo has been processed with the "cinematic" look to exaggerate the three stories. The sun lit business man, just entering the frame with a look of utmost practiced seriousness, the younger man receiving some good news and the lost expression of the woman on the bike all tell differing versions of a moment in time. I have always been drawn to the works of National Geo, Magnum and the early street shooters for this reason. They wanted humanity to open to them, spontaneously and honestly, something that is becoming ever less attainable in modern life. Everyone has a story, everyone has a life that is theirs, but a small insight into their world can make ours richer as long as no harm is done. 

The camera was again the EM5 and the 25mm f1.8 set at f4. Auto focus was used with the central focus point only and was a little off, so on close inspection the front players are a little soft and the cars in the background are sharper. From then on I trusted the face detect and wide area focus system more for this type of work. I have a habit of walking out the door with a wide or normal lens and short telephoto. This day I chose the 25mm instead of the 17mm and found most of the images taken had a tighter tension to them and were technically harder to take. I had more hits that day, but also more misses.

Cinematic echoes

Almost as important as taking a photo is presenting that image the way you want to get your vision across.   

The above image, taken in Osaka last spring, attracted me because of the layers of different people, but I struggled with its presentation. Something was missing from the image's look. It reminded me of something, but I could not put my finger on it. Then one day a friend said "it's kind of cinematic. like the cast of Reservoir Dogs on a promo poster", and so began the cinematic experiment (basically semi panoramic aspect with rich colours, selective focus and dramatic light). Not many images work for it, but when they do, nothing else seems to do. It's easier to do with a lens over 100mm (full frame) as that mimics the compression of cinema better, but can be accomplished as this one is with a wider angle. The confident guy with a cigarette and his friends, the disinterested delivery man, the dog attached to an invisible owner, the yellow cab filling the blank space, the evenly spaced colour points and the slightly hurried looking business man work as the main characters in an untold story. 

The camera was the OMD EM5 and the lens the 25mm f1.8 at about f4 (50mm at f8 on a full frame), using autofocus with face detection. I love the light in Osaka. Its brighter and clearer looking than Tokyo, especially around the newer buildings near the station.