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:
Wait. What? What sort of title is that for an “Into The Foto" blogpost. Well, there's a reason. Of late (well, actually over the past several years) I've been seeing all manner of posts that sound way too much like medicine shows of old; items such as “10 Things to improve your Landscapes”, “10 Foods to Avoid!”, “ISIS, 10 things to know!” and most recently “The 10x Principle: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure as a Photographer”. It's the last one that kinda broke the damn dam and has had me working on this post for the last three weeks.
Before I go any further, I want to post the following disclaimer:
“I have an immense amount of respect for Eric and for the work that he has done as a photographer, blogger, interviewer and educator. This post (I hope) begins a dialectic on what success and failure as an artist is compared to that of, say a geophysicist, dot-com entrepreneur or hockey player. ”
In my introduction I alluded to medicine shows. I always view universal absolutes with a jaundiced eye for a variety of reasons; mainly I've seen way too many cure-alls come down the pike each promising to fix, once and for all, poor data collection, bad project management, and a weak wrist shot. It is almost as if we don't really want to think for ourselves and would rather have someone throw out a panacea so that we can continue to flail around until the next wunderwaffen gets thrown over the wall by the marketdroids at Bang-o-grams-R-Us, Sirius Cybernetics or Jacques Latouque Hockey Sticks.
Talent
The first thing that struck me in Eric's post was that when his student (I presume) asked: “Will I be a successful photographer?” there was no discussion if the student had any talent for photography in the first place. Without a modicum of talent or at least some creative vision no 12 step program will make you successful. Sure, you can tweet and blog and network and build up your brand but if you don't have any innate talent, you really won't go that far in the Business of Photography.
When I was a kid I wanted to play pro hockey in the worst possible way; stands to reason, I'm a Canadian. But no matter how hard I worked, no matter how hard I practiced I faced a major hurdle: cement hands. 30 odd years later I picked up the game again and yup, still cement hands.
If you are going to embark on the Business of Photography, be honest with yourself. Do you have any talent for this? And this includes thing such as creative vision and an ability to deal with people like Bridezilla.
Success? Failure?
This brings me to the next observation: nowhere is “success” or “failure” defined. Judging from the remainder of the article it appears that these are defined in terms of money and prestige. I posit that it's way more than that.
I'm going dispose of Failure right now and not return to it. Failure is not the antithesis of success as some would have it; rather Failure is one of the foundations of success. If I don't make a mistake (failure) at least once a day then that is one less opportunity to learn and develop. The only result of a failure that is a “true” failure is when you do not to seize upon that mistake and learn from it. For whatever reason we equate a business folding as a failure. Bollocks. Businesses fold for all manner of reasons and if the entrepreneur does not look back at what happened and learn from it then it is a failure. Failure as a photographer is not making the image, not growing as an artist, not treating your subjects with honour and dignity, not saying anything significant and deluding yourself that you are doing these when, in fact, you are not.
Remember the words of Buckminster Fuller:
“There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes”
What then is success? In business I suppose it means profits, cash flow and a sustained business presence. What about for the artist? What about for the photographer? Dave duChemin makes this observation in his “Craft and Vision” series:
“To some it will be a great business that replaces your soul-numbing day job, for others it means creating work you love even if no one ever sees it.”
So, everything hinges on your definition of success. Only the individual can do that and even then it is as elusive to define as it is to attain. Just make sure you know what you are getting yourself in for, unlike Mr. Anchovy:
I can't tell you what success is because I don't know your circumstances; I can tell you what success isn't based on my experiences as father, geophysicist, bespoke software writer, and one time dot-com 1.0 entrepreneur and hack photographer:
Success isn't overnight, it's incremental. You'll never wake up one morning a “success”. You may wake up one morning smarter that last night, richer than last night, more content than last night.
Success isn't easy. No matter how you define it, big or small, getting there is hard work.
Success doesn't destroy families, relationships, your integrity or your soul.
Success doesn't come at all costs. See above.
Success isn't about money.
And sorry, I can't tell you how to attain your success and avoid those pitfalls; only you can sort that out.
Success and the Work-Life Balance
I'm reminded of a story that I heard somewhere, back before the idea of work-life balance started getting ink. It's about what constitutes success and what matters in life.
To turn Eric's exemplar from Thiel around (“You must study the endgame before anything else.”) : You have to be honest with what your endgame is; the fisherman knew what his endgame was before he even started.
History is Written by the Victors
Eric quotes extensively from two Web 2.0 “captains of industry” but in Business as in War, history is written by the victors and their hagiographers. After each major conflict or outrageous business success there is a “memoir boom” as participants from all levels rush to their typewriters trying to cement their place in the national histories and show how they, and only they, made “the difference at the Khyber Pass”, “ensured victory at Wadi al-Hira”, or “prevented disaster at D-Day”.
Every dot-com gazillionaire has, is or will be generating endless ghost written words about why they were successful and their competitors a bunch of nebbishes who where incapable of arranging a piss up in a brewery. All of these tomes may have a germ of truth in them, but all of them are written a posteriori through the coloured glasses of hubris and ulterior motive: usually to confirm the corporate “founding legend”.
These authors most certainly weren't thinking of the management gems they are now writing about when they were in the heat of battle building the company. I'll invoke a military analogy here; it was more along the lines of “We need to take reference X to take City Y. (strategic goal). To do that we need to first encircle Hill Q (tactical goal) and then control roads A, B and C (tactical goal). We will succeed using this battalion, that air wing and that tank corps.” Of course it never quite works that way because of unanticipated counter attacks, equipment failures and other tactical goals that where never thought of in the first place. When they get to X and C it's sit back, catch your breath and then lay plans for the next strategic goal.
At the end of the conflict of course the generals and field marshals look back and say “Oh weren't we clever, we did R, S and T and that is how we succeeded in taking Y.” This is what gets written in the memoirs when in actual fact while R, S, and T may have been helpful in the taking of Y, if they were honest with themselves, R, S and T were responses to particular circumstances not part of any great gift of wisdom and in fact the success was that they could extemporize and create R, S and T before the other guy did.
Back when a certain Netherlands based company was an investor in my Web 1.0 company, I recall sitting outside the great man's office waiting for a meeting to finish. It was quite a heated discussion and finally I heard a fist slam a desk and I heard a colleague shout:
“Damn it Jan! Circumstances make leaders! Leaders do not make circumstances!”
It is the circumstance that allows a person to become a leader by reacting, developing, and deploying the correct strategy and tactics. A leader attempting to manufacture circumstances to apply strategies and tactics (remember R, S, and T?) that worked in the past is asking for trouble.
What worked in the past should be recognized and used as a backdrop to inform future decisions, but to describe why SomeCo was successful after the fact by spouting atomized aphorisms that have been bent to fit the corporate legend is hubris at its finest.
Applying these atomized aphorisms to your unique circumstances is just asking for trouble. At best you can adopt the practices that fit your you and your situation.
10x? Shmenex!
Hate to break this to everybody out there: only once a generation is there a musician, photographer, a physicist, a medical figure, sporting figure, whatever that is ten times better. In business it's only once every business cycle, if that. Look at the NHL: Howe, Orr, Gretzky, Lemieux, Crosby, they only happen once a generation. Further, these guys weren't ten times better than the one before them, they where only ten times better than what was in the league at the time.
In technology true disruption has only happened a few times: The Mac, The PC, Smartphones, the World Wide Web; everything else is incremental. Consider: Twitter is just an evolution of IRC. Facebook, Google+? Their roots are in the old news groups (remember rec.alt.photography for example?). Texting? Shoot I still have an ICQ account that dates back to the nineties! The cloud? That's just FTP for dummies if all you do is store your data on it; for cloudy computing resources look up time sharing (and I don't mean condos in Puerto Vallarta).
For Google to trumpet that “we only do things that are ten times better than what went before” is as if to laugh! Is:
Android 10x better than Windows, Linux or OS-X?
Chrome 10x better than Firefox?
Google Search 10x better than Bing or Yahoo?
Google Maps 10x better than Apple Maps?
Google Nexus 10x better than an iPad or Surface Pro?
10x? Shmenex!
The Artist as a Young Brand
Doing a quick survey (well, I googled the web) I noticed the following: if you search for “personal coaches” (a really hot ticket a few years ago) and “personal branding” you'll see that pretty well the same motley crew pops up. 'nuff said.
Why in heaven's name would you, as an artist, want to brand yourself. Are you a commodity? Really? Do you need sloganeering to define who you are? Do you want to be thought of as some catchphrase? “Dodge: Ram Tough”, “Chevrolet: The Heartbeat of America”. Do you want to be pigeonholed?
I recall an interview Lee Ritenour did before a concert in Japan where he said something along the lines of:
“...it's so refreshing to play in the Far East. I can take my music in some different directions and everyone understands what I am trying to do. If I do that back home people get upset...”
And what if you decide you want to change your brand, beyond an exploration of other things as Mr. Ritenour above? Good luck with that. On the web, everything is remembered so if you don't want to be the uber-wedding photographer you once were and want to be known for f64 type landscapes that will be a massive undertaking. Ask any company that needed to re-brand; business schools have tons of case studies about what it cost those companies.
I also don't buy this thing that a brand is a tangible indication of trust. A brand is what the ad-men say it is. Branding is propaganda, dammit! You are who you are and if you are a person of integrity, humanity and talent that will get around and you'll end up fat and happy. Trust me.
And Finally
Eric provides a possible framework for commercial success in this ADHD world we currently occupy. It has little to do with photography or being successful at photography.
It's unfortunate that we all want a simple recipe for whatever we deem as success. We seem to have lost the mental discipline to truly understand what the heck we are doing and rely on public intellectuals that dispense aphorisms and treat these as oracular utterances guaranteeing good outcomes if we do the incantations properly. We have become a product of a Powerpoint mindset.
You know what? There is no single thing, no single technique, no single paradigm, workflow, process, voodoo spell, Potteresque faux Latin mumbo-jumbo or Powerpoint slide deck that will guarantee you success at anything: geophysics, bespoke software development, hockey, business, photography, anything. All what these things can do, at best and only if the deity is willing and the crick don't rise, is create a possible environment for possible success – nothing else.
It's a crap shoot. Always was, always will be and anybody who tells you different is selling you something (like snake oil). If you buy into it just make sure you pay for it in unobtanium: that way neither of you will be out of pocket. Remember the great poet Burns:
“The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy! ”
But, (there's always a but isn't there?) if all what you get out of this article are these:
“Go out and try. What's the worst that could happen? Exactly.”
“Ignore the self styled experts, the potion sellers and the 12 step specialists. They are in business to make money, usually by taking yours.”
“Do your best at what ever you do. Do it with all your heart, with integrity, with respect. You will succeed, however you may define that Success. It won't be overnight, you might be on your deathbed, but you will succeed. It may not be what you thought success would be, but you will succeed”
“Failure is the foundation of Success. How you respond to Failure will determine your Success”
“Horatio Alger wrote fiction.”
“Ignore all “Keys to Success” lists (like this one).”
then I will have, within the confines of this article, succeeded (a very modest definition of success).
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.
I always travel with a small notebook (Rhodia if you're asking) with me, either in my camera bag or my book bag. It's handy for noting addresses of people you meet, scribbling down impressions, overheard conversations and noting things you read that are of interest.
Here are few notes (shown in italics) that I've taken and expanded upon
Overheard at ICP
The ICP (International Centre for Photography) in New York was hosting a show by Sebastiao Salgado showing pictures from his book "Genesis". The photographs were stunning, to put it mildly. I wish I could have bought the huge version of the book but there was no way I'd be able to fit into even the most gargantuan of suitcases; it would have required its own seat on the airplane!
Genesis, a long term project, spanned eight years as he visited 30 of the Earth’s most pure and untouched sites. He was inspired to do the project because up until that point people had been the central subject of his work. He says that he “… wished to photograph the other animals, to photograph the landscapes, to photograph us, but us from the beginning, the time we lived in equilibrium with nature.”
I just sat an stared and dripped water on the floor (I had become drenched on the way there). I just wished everybody else would have just STFU and respect the images.
As I wandered from one gallery to the next I came upon a group of intense students led by a similarly intense instructor making the rounds of the gallery. Notebooks at the ready, hipster beards a quiver, hipster spectacles glinting efficiently, hanging on every word of the instructor they prepared for the next koan from the instructor.
Koan is perhaps overstatement as there was no subtlety in the question posed (as noted in my handy-dandy notebook):
"Does Salgado's use of aesthetics diminish the validity of the images and reduce the political content of the image...does it help or hinder the cause..."
Uh, wait, what? What cause? What political content? I saw none. Perhaps I'm naive (probably), stupid (highly likely) or both but what I saw was a collection of gripping images that reflect the purpose quoted above.
What I saw were images of stunning power, especially the mountain images taken in the Yukon. How can aesthetics reduce the validity of an image? Does an image need to be cack-handed to be "valid"? Does an image need to be gag-reflex inducing to "help the cause"?
I recommend Salgado's book. Buy the largest one you can afford (it's printed in many sizes).
A Recurrent Meme (or is it a trope?)
"I want the image that I make to be an accurate representation of what I saw through the viewfinder"
Nope, ain't ever gunna happen.
Your eye is so much more versatile than a camera. Your eye can skip and dance over its field of view, moving around the scene in three dimensions. Our image processor correlates the images, however fleeting, with past experiences, knowledge, prejudices, hopes and desires. The camera just maps a three dimensional view into a 2 dimensional rendering devoid of meaning. Your selection of framing is informed by your past experiences; a photograph will never be an accurate representation of what was there, let alone what you (thought) you saw.
It is the aesthetics of the image that bring out the meaning, taking the work of a mechanical transcriptor and turning it into a sonnet, a fugue, a short story.
The initial image is the germ of the idea, the final preparation for printing the hard labour of the poet on choosing the correct words, the author tirelessly rewriting that one section that doesn't quite work until, finally, the nuance, the feeling that you felt when you made that image weeks ago pops out of the developing tray.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't get it as right as possible in camera. At least get the exposure correct and the framing as close as reasonably possible. I have no issues burning and dodging, selectively sharpening and adjusting local contrast to tell my story, to make that poem. I deviate from the the "No crop" school as I often print images in different sizes and aspect ratios. Shooting both 3:2 and 4:3 formats I have to crop one or the other make the prints consistent. I tend to leave some slop around the edges to give me enough to "cloth" to make my suit from.
The Price of a Painting
From a documentary on the 10 most valuable paintings every sold at auction
"The price of a painting [or any piece of art] is not the value of a painting or an indication of its importance. It's just the result of two people bidding against each other."
'Nuff sed.
Photograph is Dialectic between Photographer and Subject
Now there's an interesting note heading. Sounds like some introduction to a discussion of Marxist theory or something equally arcane. This is what I wrote under that heading:
"The subject presents, the photographer reacts and the conversation continues. Almost like an ongoing moment. You never really leave the subject behind, the conversation you had with it influences the interactions you have with another subject even if it is in a completely different setting or subject space"
Either I'm incredibly pretentious or this makes some shred of sense. I've been reading and annotating Jerry Thompson's slim little volume "Why Photography Matters" and working through some of the concepts. I'm working up a little review on this book and this was a synthesis of one of the sections.
And Furthermore!
Like Steve in "Blue's Clues" always carry your handy dandy notebook and write those ideas down. Most wull be crap, but there maybe a nugget of gold hidden somewhere. Take the time to sit in your "Thinking Chair" and ruminate and expand on those notes. A whole new avenue of projects or ways of seeing just may present themselves!
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.
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.
“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
