Working Stiffs

It's been a while since I've written anything about, let done anything with a backlog of images dating to summer of last year.

First some background. My day job was (note the use of the word was) working as a flight coordinator for a charter airline. The airline flew oil company personnel to and from work sites in Northern Alberta and British Columbia. With the current geopolitical situation driving oil prices to below the costs of production (let's face it, the Western Sedimentary Basin and the Oil Sands are not low cost production environments) the flying started to slow down and my shift switched from a four on, four off rotation to three days on the weekends. All well and good. I had to do something productive with my time so I took in upon myself to write a boat load of software (something I did in a previous life, back when dinosaurs ruled and Borland was still a real company) for the OCC to streamline our operations, revamp the operations handbook and develop a series of online courses. Oddly enough this kinda sapped any creative juices I had left and I only photographed in fits and starts.

Well, as you can surmise, the flying kept going down and I got laid off about two weeks ago. No big deal, shit happens. I'll just re-invent myself, again (even though it is getting a litle stale, this re-inventing business, it being the third or fourth time; I've lost count).

Wouldn't you know it, I was able to return to the backlog and there, the creative juices started to flow. I noticed that I had a quite a few images of the working man, the guy that BTO sang about in opening verse "Takin' Care of Business". You know the ones: the ones who deliver the beer, make sure the traffic flows, make sure that the lads don't get out of control. The ones who build our buildings, clean our streets, catch our fish. I went back to some off my older images, and found a seam of hard working souls that had gone unrecognized.

I'll be adding to this collection and what is in the post gallery will change over time as images get added and deleted as the concept unfold.

After the parade, the sweeper comes always comes out. It's a tiresome job and it never seems to end.

Sweeper

New York cops, like the boys from Joisey have a natural knack for hanging out. These guys in Times Square on a hot and very muggy evening were watching the usual goings on with a sense of ennui that only comes from having seen it all night after night after night.

Another Night at Times Square

Steveston Docks is where you can buy fresh fish in Vancouver, right off the boat. It was one of those cold, damp, foggy days; the Scots would call it dreich. This fisherman kept warm by a space heater at his feet and bundled up in a parka was selling this morning's catch of spotted shrimp

Shrimp on Ice

Calgary has its dreich days as well, usually in early March when the rain is mixed with wet snow. This delivery driver is loading up in Chinatown with beef from a hole in the wall butcher shop.

Beef

Finally, this old timer was photographed in Nobleford, Alberta. He's retired, but had worked as a rig hand across the Prairies and from north of the Arctic Circle down to the Middle East. We spent a pleasant while yarning about the patch (I've worked the rigs too) and I was able to make this image.

Rig Hand

So here's to all those folks: the ones who make sure things get done. 

You can view the project here.

Insecurities, Navel Gazing and Just Getting On With It

It's been a while. I've been sitting on three photo shoots from all over and have really dragged my ass in getting them into something workable. The reasons are manifold: converting the backroom to a studio, the normal vicissitudes of domestic life and, more to the point, wrestling with what goes in, what goes out and what gets filed in "Maybe Later: The Nascent Project File"

For the past while I've been watching the photostream of the G+ Communities I subscribe to with a certain amount of disquiet; nothing overt but more a Columbo-esque "somethin's been botherin' me" kind of niggle in the quiet recesses of my brain. The best way I can put it is like this: "Is it just me, or are people just posting 'happy snaps' and passing them off as photographs? And why is it that frequent posters are not showing any improvement in story telling, technique, drama tension, humour or composition?" I have other questions that I can't articulate yet but it all forms quite the interesting cocktail party in that area of my brain. Admittedly G+ contributors are all enthusiastic amateurs (in the best sense of the word) like myself so perhaps these perceptions are realistic given the population of these communities.

On top of this there have been several insightful articles with titles such as "Kill Your Babies" (on editing your work) and "Street Photography Has No Clothes". These are but two but you get my drift.

It is with this in the background that I pulled back completely to ponder my a) editorial process, b) my entire process of engaging with the environment in which I work on any given day and c) am I getting any better or is just random chance that I make an image that is decent and finally d) are any of the images that friends and family say are good, good or is just a mercy compliment?

I finally decided that all of this was, in the end, just mental masturbation and that I should just get on with things. It was in reading Minor White's article in the first issue of Aperture that kicked me out of my funk. If you don't have it, buy "Aperture Magazine Anthology - The Minor White Years" and you'll see that many photographers today are just treading the same road as White, Lange, Newhall, and the rest trod all those years ago.

With that, I'm going to start with a my second shoot and work my way around to the other two in future posts.

I was in New York this summer for about a week (never long enough) and walked. I think I logged about 25 miles a day. After letting them stew in LightRoom for a few weeks I edited down the equivalent of 20 rolls of 36 down to 14 images that I thought were OK. After shuffling the order around to see what narratives and groupings popped out I found that I had 3 things running through the 14: Children, Workers, and Isolation.

Children

It was odd that I had taken so many images of children as I normally don't photograph them, more out of respect and not wanting to be a creep, but I was presented with such rich opportunities that this is what fell out:

 

Workers

It was brutally hot in NYC when I was there but the hard work of making the city run has to continue.

 

Isolation

I've been working on two projects called "Converse" and "Communion". They're not very strong projects yet, but I think there is some meat on those bones I can make a decent stew from given some time. Conversation's obverse is Isolation and even in Times Square (which in the summer at peak tourist season makes a Japanese subway car at rush hour seem spacious) there are moments of isolation.

 

All Said and Done

Looking at these, I think there is one great image that could stand on its own without any other context. Perhaps three others that are strong enough to be included in a portfolio. Kill your babies.

Stuck In Calgary With the Rangerfinder Blues Again

The Gang of Four Roam the Streets

I try not to write too much about cameras and technology in this blog. Brand A vs Brand B, film vs digital and all the other raging debates on the various fora on the intertubes don’t really occupy a lot of cycles for me. Over the past few months however, I’ve had an interesting time making images due to the fact that my Leica M-E had to be sent in for some warranty work and a CLA “while you’re at it.”

I’d been shooting with my M-E for almost two years and in late in January I started noticing bizarre patterns when I applied my “dust bunnies” curve in LightRoom to the images I made with the M-E. I recalled seeing something on a Leica feed about this and did some rummaging and found that yes: I had the dreaded sensor corrosion problem. To Leica’s credit, they’ll replace your sensor for free, regardless of how old your M-E/M-9 is.

Early in February I took the camera into The Camera Store in Calgary. My camera guy Stephan confirmed what I was seeing, bundled up the M-E and sent it away to the Leica Maintenance facility.

Now I was faced with a problem: what to photograph with? I did use my E-P2 for a while, but it was not as immediate and I fought continually with its “I’ll focus here, regardless of where you think I’ll focus” mindset. Don’t get me wrong, I love the camera dearly: small, light, great image quality, especially with the 45mm f1.8 lens. It just felt, well, fiddly. It’s still part of my day to day kit and shares the bag with the M-E.

I really liked the immediacy and total control I had experienced with the Leica and looking over my storage cabinet I pulled out my father’s Ricoh 500. This camera is as old as I am (pushing 60) and I’ve used it in the past and works like it’s new. I bought a couple of rolls of XP-2 figuring that it would be “easy” to get C-41 processed. I decided to pull it one stop because on a sunny day, you’re shooting at 1/500 (maximum shutter speed) at f/16. -1 stop gave me 1/250 at f/11. This decision would return to haunt me.

Working with the Ricoh was as delightful as working with the Leica. It was so stealthy, so quiet: just a slight “snick” as the leaf shutter did its magic. The rangefinder, despite it's 60 years was still clear, a bit dark, but clear and worked like a charm.

Getting into a real groove, I pulled out my OM-2n to work with as well. Batteries were a bit of a dilemma, but even though all the pundits say that the 3v lithium cells are not recommended (without providing a reason) they work fine. The Ricoh had a 45mm lens so I mounted my favourite lens of all time, the Zuiko 100 f/2.8. This is a dreamboat piece of glass: sharp, great contrast and in the words of Digital Review’s Kai: “bokehlicious”.

It was also looking like a long wait for the Leica, so I decided to run Ilford Pan-F 50 in the Ricoh as that gave me lots of room to play aperture wise on reasonably bright days. I selected Ilford Delta 100 to use in the OM-2: a yellow K2 filter that would give me the same exposure values as the Ricoh. I really am not enamored with fast films like HP-5, Tri-X and such, especially here in the high foothills where the light is overwhelming and harsh. The “Sunny 16” rule is more like a “Sunny Something much more than 16” rule the light is so god damn hard. With cameras that are limited to 1/1000s (1/500s on the Ricoh) shutter speeds you really run out of aperture fast.

Working with my old friend the OM-2n (and later my OM-4T) showed me just how far digital camera manufacturers still have to go to make a useable viewfinder. These are bright and huge! Even the Leica seems cramped in comparison! The split-image rangefinder and the micro-prism focusing ring were a delight discover all over again. Why DSLR manufacturers can’t put this in their optical viewfinders is beyond me. I’ve yet to find a cogent argument for not including these features.

I loved working with these three cameras. This is how it’s supposed to be: immediate, with no barrier between you and your subject and excellent ergonomics that don’t get in the way.

Brother of an Other Mother

I got the M-E back last week and I’ve been working with it as well as the Ricoh. If I had to choose one over the other I couldn’t: both are so easy to use, so well designed, so well-built that you feel confident with them.

I also spent a day working the Leica next to the OMs: again, brothers of different mothers. I really can’t favour one over the other. Both just work and don`t get in the way.

What was it about these cameras that make them such a pleasure to use, what lets them fade out of the way between you and your subject?

• Ergonomics – Everything is where you expect it to be. In fact on all three brands, all the major controls turn the same way, feel the same and are easy for your finger to find by touch. Surprisingly, they are all in similar places. No fiddly buttons that can be bumped by accident or that are undifferentiated in size or by texture. The viewfinders show only what is required: nothing more, nothing less. 
• Lens construction – I love the well damped focus rings on the lenses that I use with these cameras: just the perfect amount of friction, just the right feel to the rubber. It just hammered home how much I despise the focus by wire nonsense that seems to be all the rage these days.
• Build quality – these are robust bits of kit. There’s nothing flimsy, nothing fragile about them. All 4 cameras were designed for use by working photographers and you don’t feel as if you might break them if you look at them cross-eyed.

Put all this together and your imagination can soar because you leave the technology behind.

Developing Stories (Film at 11)

I’d run 4 rolls of XP-2 through the Ricoh and when I took them to “The Last MiniLab In Town” I was told that they no longer do C-41 pull or push processing. It’s not that they can’t do it, it’s just a setting after all, but they can’t be arsed, so they won’t.

Of course the selection of silver halide film opened up another can of worms: where to get them processed as well. I don’t like working with chemicals: never have. To top it off I really don’t have anywhere to mix and work with them. The thought of pouring spent chemicals down the sink and on to the water treatment plant with no silver recovery in place seems wrong to me. I’d rather find a third party that’s set up to work with this stuff.

I ended up sending my first batch of C-41 and silver halide film to Ilford in the US. It’s not cheap. If they don’t work out, there’s a custom lab in Vancouver I’m going to try. When I get the results back I’ll share them here. There is a pro here in town that will do silver but I used him once in the past and got the negatives back scratched with water spots: Ugh!

And In the End

Will I continue to shoot film? Yes, of course. Will I drop digital? No way. Both have their place and I’ll shoot them side by side in the same shoot if needed. It’s not either/or for me.

I’ve got as near to perfect digital cameras as you can get; I’ve got the perfect film cameras. I’m a happy man.

Conversations in Vancouver

Toys in Window, Robson Street

Vancouver is a strangish place to photograph. Having grown up there, the layout of the city seems to be imprinted on my DNA, yet what is now there only partially resonates with what was imprinted all those years ago.

I love the light however. On the west coast the light is gentle and on a misty day with the sun peeking through it has a special luminosity, specialness that I’ve never found anywhere else.

The street can be challenging as, like New York, there is always the risk of descending into cliché; especially when you wander towards the east side of downtown YVR. The cadence however is different from NYC. New York never really sleeps. Even early in the morning there is a vibrancy and a pulse that Vancouver doesn’t seem to have; well it does have: around 1100 in the morning everyone pushes back from their desks, toddles off for and elevenses of a venti Americano decaf low foam no sugar extra shot and then off to a resto with a one word moniker like “Bleen”, “Food” or some such for a lengthy lunch. Later at night, until the clubs close, there is a sort of pulse, but you are dodging binge drinkers, the “lads”, and the ubiquitous rough sleepers.

Like many cities, the west end of Vancouver is posher than the east end. Denman Street acts a demarcation between the posh condo’s bordering Stanley Park and the newer condos and street scene of Robson and Davey Streets. A collection of low buildings that has the feel of the Vancouver I knew. A well-heeled crowd, by and large, and relatively free from the tourists that now prowl Robson make up Denman’s street scene.

I was standing on a corner watching the flow and saw two gentlemen walking down the street deep in conversation. I was lucky that they had to wait for the light to change.

Passing Knowledge

After a foray to the other (east) end of town I commented in my notebook:

“When confronted with the filth and squalor of the DTE in YVR it’s very easy to revert to the cheap shot rather than try and find the basic humanity of the people on the streets.
-Not sure how to approach (coward?) so I avoided it”

I did make on image though that, I think, does capture the dignity of the people there. On Carrall Street, just off Hastings is Wings Café; it’s been there in one form or another as long as I can remember. I walked back and forth along this block and just out of the corner of my eye on one pass I saw the door open and these gentlemen step out to continue their conversation over a fresh cup of joe and a smoke:

Wings Cafe

I gave this one a Kodachrome look, because by now I was starting to flash on Fred Herzog. The light matched, my mood matched, all was good.

Herzog holds a special place for me. His images capture the Vancouver I grew up in and I have a hard time separating his images as an artist from the images in my memory. In some I can still smell the fug of the inside of a BC Hydro trolley bus on a rainy day.

His images of what is now the Downtown East Side are especially poignant for me. I remember walking these streets, from the Army and Navy, on to Woodwards, Eatons and then The Bay. Of course you never went down to Gastown (we called it Skid Row then) but Hastings (although in decline) was still busy street. I’m not going to get into what happened or why; I don’t have all the information and enough has been written by urban planners, sociologists and everybody else and their dog.

I’d like to contrast Herzog’s Hastings with how I found Hastings this past February. This is a picture made by Herzog around when I was about 4 or 5, looking east along Hasting at Columbia.

E. Hastings and Columbia (c) Fred Herzog

I had no idea that I was treading familiar ground when I lined up and made the following image. It was only afterwards that something twigged when I was looking at the images in the hotel room.

Hotel Balmoral - East Hastings

This is confirmation, I suppose, of Geoff Dyer’s thesis of the “ongoing moment”: all of us are treading the same paths and, unknowingly influenced by what went before, we make our own interpretations of similar subjects at particular place and time.

Gotta Learn Something (or I’m wasting my time)

I think the hardest thing for a documentary/urban photographer to learn is concentrating on treating your subjects with respect. I really dislike 90% of the images presented as street photography. Some of them are just sloppily composed, exposed and/or processed. Some don’t say anything or don’t even try. Others cheapen the subject, cheapen the genre and are trite and clichéd in the end cheapening the photographer. Photographing a homeless man passed out in a doorway says what? It says nothing, it asks nothing and it does nothing to advance the human condition.

I’m not trying to change the world, just ask questions and tell a story about life and I guess I expect other photographers to do the same.

I’m not one for the “in your face” style of work that seems to be all the rage. A bit of refined distance is, I think, permitted. It requires patience and the ability to fade into the walls until the right moment but I’m OK with that.

I find that my favourite images of a period of making images are those made when I’m in the zone: that wonderful feeling of nothingness and everythingness, of a complete connection with your environment where every pattern of light and dark and colour set up a vibration so deep that you can’t but help to trip the shutter. B.A. Baracus would say: “Damn fool on the Jazz, again.”

Technical Stuff

I really try to downplay the technical aspects of my images as it really doesn’t matter; it’s the story what counts. In this case however, I’d like to share a very useful set of tools. I decided to process the colour images using a wonderful set of Lightroom plugins that mimic the Kodachrome films of old. You can find them here:

http://x-equals.com/blog/in-memoriam-kodachrome-1935-%E2%80%93-2010/

These are the best that I’ve found so far and for the price (free) highly recommended.

NYC Conversations

One last tranche from my fall trip to New York and then on to other work. To paraphrase “The Naked City”: “There are eight million conversations in the naked city.” These images show some of those conversations: public or private, intimate or contentious, posturing or honest.

This couple was walking hand in hand past Madison Square Garden enjoying the fall evening, enjoying each other’s company. At an intersection, laughing at a shared joke they embraced; an honest embrace, a deep embrace, an embrace filled with love and laughter.

Embrace

Of course some people have the contrary image: the abrasive, argumentative New Yorker. I had passed this group of friends several times and at a stage in Times Square they stopped to visit. On the surface this image would confirm the stereotype. In fact the opposite is true. They were listening to each other intently (Times Square is noisy) and the very next instant all of them burst out in laughter. In another post I ranted a bit about people wanting their images to reflect the reality as they saw it; well, this shows that you can manipulate that reality using space and time. Once again, context is everything.

You talkin' to me?

As if it's not hard enough to develop human relationships in the "Naked City" we seem to sabotage our attempts by erecting so many artificial barriers. These four friends pulled up in the Village and no sooner had they crossed the street than out came the iThingies; other people more interesting than the people they were with.

iThingies

How different from this group of friends, in the moment, using the same technology to come together.

We were here

That's about it for New York for now. The remainder of the images can be found in my Smugmug gallery, here. I'm really looking forward to my next visit and work on some of the themes that I've written about. Brooklyn beckons as well.

Some Local Colour

Traditional street photography gravitates towards black and white images. I prefer black and white for street work to isolate the shapes and themes I find interesting in the image; sometimes colour just works a charm.

Times Square at night is a riot of colour. After the "clean up" it lost most of its grit, save the cranky cartoon character clad panhandlers and the occasional scalper hustling tickets. The lighting, on the other hand, rivals Las Vegas and Shinjuku in Tokyo (I should dig up the those Japanese images). I used to sweat things like colour balance and such, but really, it's such a pop-art atmosphere in these sort of situations that I just set everything to auto white balance and go.

Road Warriors

Rain always makes for some interesting colour images, especially if there are some bright colours to work with. The umbrella image in my previous post was basically a monochrome image and it worked better, in my opinion, as black and white. On the other hand this image of Times Square with the slashing line of red tables glistening in the rain shows what you can get on a rainy day.

Red Tables

New York's finest are getting a lot of flak right now but the Traffic Division always gives a wonderful source of material. Some look like dancers, some look like actors, some could be evangelical tent preachers as they herd New York's obdurate traffic around construction, parades, protests and whatever the hell else happens on New York's streets. Again, the rain really saturated this traffic cop's safety vest and his arms outstretched in benediction belie the fact that he was questioning an Escalade driver's ancestry, sexual proclivities and planetary origin.

Benedictus

I posted this red Eldorado in my first series of posts about New York but I went back and did some post processing to it. There is a wonderful set of Kodachrome presets for LightRoom that for the life of me I can't remember where I found them; I do recall that they were free. Anyway, here's that red Eldorado processed as Kodachrome 25.

Red Eldorado

Waiting and Watching

New York is a city of intersections: streets intersect avenues, social castes intersect, and all the while there are people, people waiting and watching. Even though New York is a city that seems in perpetual motion, if you watch and wait, you’ll catch those people waiting and watching.

This was one of my first photographs I made during my stay in New York. I heard the rat-tat-tat of high heels and turned around and saw a woman in white dashing down the stairs to catch the subway while the hipster watched the scene around him.

Uptown & The Bronx

My second day in New York alternated between a light mist and pelting rain. I was wet and grumpy but my heavens the reflections and the light made up for wet socks and fogged over glasses. Pausing at an intersection on 6th Avenue, I saw this collection of Wet Mushrooms and a bit further on one of New York’s finest stoically enduring the rain.

Wet Mushrooms

NYPD

In Soho there is a café called Fanelli’s. They say it’s one of the oldest in New York dating back to 1847. I had a good lunch there. Afterwards I stood at the intersection of Mercer and Prince and watched the watcher watching the watchers.

Watching the Watchers

Bus stops are interesting places. People wait, people watch. Like the future, the bus will come.

5th Ave/W 23rd Street

New York State of Mind

Daddy don't drive that Eldorado no more

“New York remains what it has always been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts in population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring – it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence”

Paul Goldberger

Swept up the stairs at Penn Station on a tide of bustling humanity and emerging like a blinded mole from the labyrinth underneath Madison Square Garden you are subjected to an opto-aural assault that, if you (like me) are from one of the quieter metropolises, leaves you weak in the knees. The energy is palpable, the billboards seizure inducing and the combined noise of millions of cellphones beeping, people talking and taxis honking have the eardrums cowering in submission.

I was in New York a few weeks ago; it was my first visit and I wanted to prove myself on the same streets that the great photographers prowled and still prowl. Boy did I ever feel like a beer league hockey player in the NHL.

The pace on the streets is incredible. Scenes coalesce and then vanish in an instant. You have to learn to see and react in a heartbeat. In cities where I’ve worked the street in the past you have enough time to frame, focus and shoot. In NYC: frame and go. If you don’t have your cameras setup beforehand: too bad, so sad.

I would get up at around 9, have breakfast and hit the streets and work till around 4 in the afternoon. If my feet could stand it, I’d go out at night for a few hours to watch the street theatre unfold.

A preliminary look at the photos doesn’t show a lot of promise but they do seem to show improvement in technique and composition as the week went on. I’ve put this trip down to an initial recce and learning mission as I wasn’t focussing on any theme or idea: I was trying to drink from a fire hose!

What did I learn? 

Where to begin! I learned more in these 6 days than I have in months.

Urban Geography 

The light in New York is special. I could never figure out why the streets seemed to be always in a way so differently from Calgary. Part of it is latitude and elevation but mostly it’s the orientation of the streets. Downtown Calgary is oriented east-west and the streets are not very long relatively speaking. The office towers block the light for most of the day, with only a few street corners getting any sort of decent light. The only light is early in the morning and even then only at certain times in the spring and fall.

New York on the other hand is oriented north-south and its streets stretch for miles; the topography of the buildings let the light fall in a way that gives a wonderful chiaroscuro.

As well the street action is relentless. Even though the office towers dwarf those in Calgary, the streets are packed with people interacting with each other face to face, on cellphones or just doing their jobs. In Calgary, the Plus-15 pushes everything up into a warren of corporate habitrails leaving the streets empty except for the homeless and the lost tourist. 

Perspective

Looking at my images I found the perspectives skewed with respect to other photographers who had walked the same streets. Well, turns out that at 6’ 4” I’m about 9 inches taller than the average male so my POV is automatically different. I experimented shooting from chest level with an Olympus XZ-2 (it has the flip out screen). That’s about 2 feet lower than my normal vantage point and the perspectives (lo and behold) had a more familiar look to them. So, I guess I have to learn to use my height as a way of giving a unique view of the streets.

Gear

The pace is so fast: if you don’t know your gear you may as well forget it and go home. New York is not the place to try and figure out how your equipment works and still make any meaningful images. I knew where all the buttons and dials where on my two long-time friends: the M-E and E-P2 which allowed me to adapt my slower, studied shooting style to a more frenetic one. The one thing I really had to learn was where the “nub” on the Biogon 35 was. This, combined with using hyperfocal and zone focusing, let me make instant adjustments without trying to line up spots in the rangefinder.

I picked up an Olympus XZ-2 while I was there and luckily the control layout (the important ones) is very similar to that of the EP2 and with the level of customization that Olympus offers I was able to set things up so it was transparent to my hands which camera I was using.

The one thing that got up my snout with my gear was the truculent AF of the E-P2. Even with just one focus point enabled, it would sometimes hunt and hunt and I’d never truly know what it focussed on. The XZ-2 was a better performer in that regard and I'm seriously looking for a used EP-5 to replace the E-P2.

(The reason I shoot both Olympus and Leica is that I love the 45mm Oly lens. It gives me a discreet 90 portrait lens and under the right conditions it gives you some amazing street shots: isolating the story from all the other stories.)

Thank heavens that I travel light. I know that Tod Papageorge prowled Central Park with a 4x5 view camera, channeling Brassai, but I'm old, my back gets sore and I worked in the patch for too long for my knees to deal with carrying a lot of kit around. It’s why I like my Leica and Olympus. I use a small home converted shoulder bag from Red Canoe and all in I only carry about 3 pounds. I pity the tourist I saw in Times Square with a honking big DSLR of some type, huge zoom lens and a backpack with more gear and a tripod. My back started to hurt just looking at him. 

The Fundamentals

My understanding of exposure and reading the light was really put to the test. With all that wonderful light I was faced with everything from dark shadow to bright whites. You have to make an instant decision if you want to use any exposure compensation. Yes, you can fix things in post, but getting it close is better than being way off. Again it’s all about reaction time. I’m fortunate, I learnt on a match needle exposure system and before that with an incident light meter so it was a bit easier but I still had to work at it as I've gotten lazy of late.

If you want to make your rangefinder or manual focus camera sing on the streets hyperfocal and zone focusing is one of those things you need have down cold; that and being able to judge distance. It works like this: Set your focus zone and then wait, like a fisherman waiting for that trout. Watch the story evolve, anticipate and when the moment happens pounce, working feverishly to try and get as much of the story into the can as possible. Don't mess around with focussing, just focus (dear god, did I write that?) on the framing. If you’ve set up properly you’ll get the story, or at least most of it. I had to remind myself of this again and again. I have to get this to become much more instinctive.

You have to know your composition down cold. Now, I’m not averse to cropping, straightening and other magic but you truly have to always aware of when you are in the presence of an image and you have to work that scenario until the scene goes away. If anything I didn’t work some scenes enough and left some images “on the table” as it were.

Why they say 28 on the streets

I seem to recall a comment (probably apochryphal) made by HCB when asked why he used a 50mm all the time: “Well,” he said with a Gallic shrug and an impish grin, “a wide angle makes it too easy.”

Easy for him, perhaps; I toiled mightily, finding my 35 too long because of the narrowness of the sidewalks and the volume of people. I can understand why a 28 would possibly be preferable and why some street photographers like the up close work that a 28 or wider lets you do. I did finally get a handle on the 35 and became comfortable with it, but as with all technique, I’ll need a lot more practice.

Learning to Dance

I keep talking about pace and rhythm. Going from Calgary to Vancouver to Toronto to New York I learned that the rhythm of the streets are so very different and the way I, as a photographer, danced to that rhythm impacts how your images turn out. Being able to feel, understand and then respond to those rhythms when you first get to a new place is crucial. I’m still learning those chops.

Strand Books

I learned that I can’t go in there with a credit card. I came out with about 200 bucks worth of books. I could have spent triple that. What a wonderful place. My good lady wife has confiscated 3 of them and I don't get them till Christmas.

Final Thoughts

Well, off to the darkroom. The lead-in shot was a quick grab from my upload in the library (Thank you, Steely Dan, for the title) and I'll leave you with this one: 

Position of Strength

Once I boil down all the frames to something worthwhile (maybe 5 based on my first run through) I'll share them with you.

Oh yeah. I can hardly wait to go back. If I had a plane ticket for tomorrow…

There’s one last quote I want to share:

“One belongs to New York instantly; one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in 5 years”  Tom Wolfe

People Come, People Go

One thing that is a certainty in the aviation business, especially a charter operation, is that pilots will always move on. Usually it's because they're chasing bigger, faster aircraft with the hope of ending up at a mainline carrier.

I seldom "play requests" as I shoot for myself but one of our pilots is leaving to fly a 737 after several years at North Cariboo and he asked me to make a few images next to the aircraft he flew while he was here. He was a close a friend as you can get in this gypsy industry so I said sure.

I shot the usual but as we were finishing up he walked over to get the prop ties and engine plugs. I turned and saw him walking into the sun. One shot was all I had.

Goodbye

See ya buddy. It was a delight working with you. Hope to work with you again.

Conversation and Communion

Granville Street February

I was in Vancouver earlier this year for a break from the "maximum effort" flying that is so common for our charter operation during the winter. A typical Vancouver February: watery sun, flat light and on my last full day, fog, misty rain and a cloud deck that aviators would call VV001. 

 

I grew up in many places in British Columbia, but Vancouver was one like a perihelion for my family's orbit around the province as the government of the time was pulling the transportation infrastructure into the twentieth century. Every city has a DNA and no matter what sort of urban renewal happens, if you scratch deep enough you'll find it. When I get into Vancouver I still feel, like Commander Vimes, the cobbles through the soles of my shoes even if where the Cafe Heidelberg once was there no stands a glitzy temple to trendy fashions. 

Evenings in Vancouver are special, no matter what time of year. The streets always have something going on - unlike Calgary where it's a stampede out of the city to the suburbs leaving the hivemind empty save for the immigrant cleaners tidying up after a day’s hard free enterprise. Just standing on a corner gives you boatloads of ideas and images.

While I was out walking a small idea for a project started to glimmer in my mind; I noticed that everywhere people were huddled close together in conversation over food. In groups of two, three and more people laughed, flirted, argued, wept.

Don't Cook - Just Eat

Diner Date

Specials

Looking at the take from the two evenings I saw something else. The interaction between the service people and food truck operators was a similar to the interaction between priest and communicant. Makes sense, Communion does commerate a meal.

Priestess

Waiting for the Host

Of course, not all the priests had communicants. Like one of Pratchett's Small Gods they had few if any adherents, no matter how inviting the chapel

Hot Dog

Pizza, Lasagna, Poutine

And some were excommunicated or never had a small god. Wandering Vancouver's East Side this fellow stopped me. He had an interesting story and we shared a conversation; he gave me two cartoons he had sketched and I gave him some money for a coffee.

Itinerant Cartoonist

Techincal Notes

The usual rig (not that it really matters but some people care): Lieca M-E (Biogon 35/'Cron 50), EP-2 (Olympus 45). All with my usual workflow: Raw conversion and exposure correction in Lightroom, noise reduction and sharpening with NIK and final post with NIK (Viveza/Silver Efex).