There’s my dad in that opening shot, lighting up another cigarette. Perhaps we could say he’s been blinded by too many lights, his eyesight isn’t great, but then he’s coming up to his 91st birthday so smoking may not be the culprit. Anyway, this blog post isn’t about my dad even though there will be one coming at some point. I already have the title by the way, his favourite when he played the piano, George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”. What was I saying again? Oh, yes… Blinded By The Light. This post was triggered whilst walking the dogs the other morning, I realised that I’m still relying on light with my Street Photography and might need a little adjustment in the way of I see. That paragraph came together surprisingly well in the end, anyway, it’s all connected…
Of course light is vital to photography, even I know that and furthermore it doesn’t escape my notice that it can be incredibly beautiful. By the way the photo above taken early the other morning looks as though it’s been Photoshopped to death, it hasn’t. It is the RAW image more or less, just cropped a little. Bringing my dad back into this once again, whenever we would see a sunrise or sunset he’d say “if you painted that scene exactly as you see it and with those colours no one would believe you”. Fortunately I have a camera so there’s no need to demonstrate my painting skills, believe me you’ll be eternally grateful for sparing you that experience. So, as photographers we all rely on light, but sometimes we might be over reliant on it. I looked through my last post (Abu Dhabi Four) and a lot of the photos are mainly light based. I try to incorporate a little more, to tell a story, but essentially they revolve around pretty light. That’s fine and dandy for most genres of photography, but I’m not sure it always helps with Street Photography. Are Street Photographers clicking and posting too many photos that are all form and very little content? I set myself a task. I might as well reveal straight away that attempt number one failed, no surprises there to anyone who regularly reads this blog.
My aim would be to get into Bath only when it’s dull and overcast for some Street Photography sessions. It’s tough to find time at the moment and if I’m limiting myself to just bright sunny days, well this is England after all and I’d never get out. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a fairly simple task to set, all that’s needed is to check the weather forecast. It’s rarely accurate and for some unfathomable reason I have this misplaced trust in the forecasts, if it predicts a sunny day then I’m usually sheltering from the rain. If it says “Cloudy and dull” as it did on this day, well, you can see from that shot of ‘Pultney Bridge” that it wasn’t particularly dull, okay, there are some clouds and so we’ll give them a little credit for getting that right. The theory was that I wouldn’t be able to rely purely on bright sunlight and shadow, high contrast images. Instead I’d have to pay a little more attention to the content of my photos, a challenge. Let’s take a look at this photographic test in practice on it’s first outing…
Really? The first thing I do when there’s no sun or much light is take a selfie, that’s okay, but did it have to be through a Ray-Ban Sunglasses shop window with lots of light on the displays. Here’s another reflection shot…I’m in this one again right of frame. Note the ‘not’ forecasted blue sky, the light was flat though as is clear in the following shot of our bearded ‘ZZ Top’ friend.
Hold on. I didn’t think this through at all. Light is still involved, it’s simply diffused and flat. There are no shadows or harsh contrasts to depend on, that’s the experiment I intended. Effectively we go back to the blog post I wrote almost four years ago, Form versus Content , that was a collaboration with my good friend Jeff Chane-Mouye. I just looked at the comments and it seems that my take on Gary Winogrand’s observation that “a photograph is a battle between form versus content” was lost on quite a few people. Essentially I was saying that it can’t be all about form, light, shadow and so forth, there has to be some content or interesting subject matter. I tried to draw an analogy with writing. To save you looking back at the article:
'‘Art, Photography and even Writing use form and content. For instance, what we write and how we arrange those words. There is a very famous example of this from Hemingway; no need to write a novel Ernest, forget the "form", all those pages, chapters and ink just for a moment, give us some "content" in six words that tells us a story and will make a reader think. Here was his answer - "For sale: baby shoes, never used". Now that is extremely sad, powerful and thought provoking. A lot of questions asked and pure genius by Mr Hemingway”.
All I managed was a minor drug deal going down, a woman with some kind of sixth sense and someone waving for help because a seagull was intimidating her.
I hope you can see what I was attempting with this little test. Those light and shadow, contrasty shots are easy to make, really I’m just trying to avoid them and make things a little more difficult to sharpen up my Street Photography. It was torture this experiment. I’m not entirely sure whether limiting that high contrast light or just an off day was responsible, I struggled nevertheless. I think the next time I’ll go in the rain which is a real pain on a motorcycle, but I think it might help and there are definitely some opportunities for some good frames. When I arrived back to where I’d parked my bike the sun came out. I grabbed a quick shot and rode off into the ‘not’ forecasted sunset…it’s mostly form very little content:
Let’s leave it there and move on as this is turning into one of those stream of consciousness with no planning kind of blog posts. To end here’s some shots from Louis’ birthday outing.
Here’s Louis and his friends looking as though they’re actually listening to the Health & Safety briefing before their Karting session on Sunday in the first shot. “No reckless driving, bumping into each other, slow down when the red flag comes out…”. Their excuse and mine too if I was 10 years old: “I couldn’t hear it with the helmet on”.
As always my sincere thanks go to anyone taking the time to read this blog.
All images can be opened by clicking on the thumbnails and are made using a Leica M with Summicron 28mm Lens fitted.
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