In the blink of an eye

The light was magnificent, low evening sun, full of promise. I knew there where great pictures in the air, I only had to grab them. Only. In conditions like that I become very focussed, single minded and unsocial. There are pictures to be found, never mind the rest. While climbing the escalator, I saw these women coming down, I had no time to set anything, I just raised the camera and clicked. Mind you, this is an M6, no Auto-anything as we know it today (but a lot of automation in it's days LOL). I always pre-set my exposure to a setting that more-or-less suits the environment I am in, and sometimes a zone-focussing distance, but not this time. You can see that the girl in the center is out of focus, the focus seems to be set to a greater distance, look at the person in the back. Probably ∞ . But all that technical bla is completely irrelevant here. See & Shoot, think later. I love this picture, it is a direction of style I would like to go to. For me, ...

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide when to click. The picture itself is there in your mind. You know the 'what', the sentiment you want to capture. But when.. The lines, the people, the technical stuff on the ceiling, not difficult to see. But there would be a lot of people in the frame, and they should be, but which one to choose as main actor, what expression or movement or silhouette to wait for? In the end, I took a few different frames, concentrating on the woman a little to the right of the centre, sitting next to the window. Exposure was a little tricky, I wanted to show the world outside the window, silhouette the people, but at the same time I wanted to keep as much of the inside of the room visible. I measured for the foreground, the table and the floor, reasoning that the film would be able to capture the lighter parts. This might not work so well with digital, but film has an astonishing ability to capture the lighter parts. The o...

I don't fancy a description to accompany a picture, this is not journalism. I prefer to let the viewer work it out. But in this case the why does have an added value. This is at the Making of Harry Potter Studio Tour, near London, just before entering the actual studio. Enough said. Technically, another challenge, I had to react super quickly, he just popped in view, looking like he did, so I just snapped. Hence the tilted frame etc. Never mind, content always wins over technique in my view.

When taking pictures during a day, either working on a story or just visiting an unknown place, I have a tendency to take less and less pictures. Creating photographs takes a lot of energy, but so does moving through an unknown place, or city, or environment, interacting with your surroundings, getting fed in time, moving from one location to another, you get the idea. In other words, I get tired. Very tired, and often much too tired to continue taking meaningful pictures. I just can't be bothered anymore. Not a big deal when I take pictures for my own fun, but it becomes a problem when I have to deliver something at the end. I will force myself to keep working, but only to find out that the quality is not really there anymore. I am just too tired. The above picture was taken with the beautiful Leica Elmarit 2.8/135mm. Not too bad a picture, not all that special either. And the only picture I took with that lens during the entire day. I carried over 700 gr. of lens...