Being Invisible

Nature photographers go to great lengths to stay invisible to their subjects, climbing trees, wearing camouflage, and sitting painfully still for hours, waiting for their shot.  To observe a system is to make yourself a part of it, and when you do that, you change it.  When you change it, it's just not natural anymore.

People change a lot when they realize they're being photographed.  I'm not just talking about strangers in the street; it's even true at social gatherings with close friends.  It's like they switch to a completely different set of muscles the instant they see the camera pointed in their direction.  They change their gait, get the deer-in-headlights look, avoid being in the photograph, smile awkwardly, pose, or try to act "natural", which is everything but.  Once this starts happening, your shot is blown, and it's time to move on and look for something else to photograph.

Unfortunately, unlike nature photographers, I don't have the luxury of shooting from 100 feet away with a bazooka lens.  There's just not enough room for that on the sidewalk, and there would just be too many people in the way anyway.

There's one thing I have going for me, though -- this is New York City.

There is so much going on in New York that the photographer is usually the least interesting thing around.  The thing is, though, it's hard to ignore that instant when you suddenly find yourself staring into a camera lens.  It's like looking down the barrel of a gun.

No, I'm not hiding behind potted plants and popping up to take sneaky spy shots.  That's being creepy.  I'm up front about the fact that I have a camera slung over my shoulder.  The trick isn't to actually be invisible; the trick is to wait for people to forget about the camera.

Try this:

Take the camera away from your face and look around.  Watch people's eyes as you walk by.  Most of them never notice you.  The ones that do will usually look away after a split second.  That's your chance.  They've mentally registered you as part of the background, and have gone on to find something more interesting to look at, and now you're cleared to take a shot.  If you'd had the camera up and pointed at them when they looked at you, that would have been when the headlight-eyes came up.

In the case where they just don't look away, well... congratulations, you've just made a friend.  Smile and say hello.

Anyway, a great bonus is when what they're looking at is also in the frame.  If your subjects have found something interesting to look at, your viewers might find it interesting, too.  Just like leading lines in a composition, eyes in a picture lead your viewer's eyes to a thing of importance.  In the photo at the top of this post -- which, by the way, is one of my personal favorites -- there's something happening and there are people watching it happen.  The four people in the photo have nothing to do with each other, but here are sharing a moment together (it was literally a moment; she had snagged her skirt on something, and fixed it in a second, and everyone glanced at the same time and moved on).

Without the three gentlemen in the frame as a supporting cast, the viewer is a lone voyeur, looking upon the woman while staying unseen.  Sometimes that's what you want in a photograph, as it creates an intimate connection with a subject.

However, for this one, the're already an audience gathering, and the viewer is invited to have a seat.

Snow Day

By the time I got out of the house, there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground, with more coming down.  Actually, it was sleet, stinging my face and bouncing off the hood of my jacket with a steady rattle.  I stood for 45 minutes at the bus stop with a bunch of people for a bus that never came, and then turned around and went home.

I spent most of the day developing film and reading "Slightly Out of Focus" by Robert Capa, who you should remember from the previous post.  It's the memoir of his work in World War II and it comes with the disclaimer, "All events and persons in this book are accidental and have something to do with the truth."

I'm only about halfway through it, but so far, it's been just my kind of story.  It's got photos in it, but it's not really a photo book.  It takes place during a war and it's about a photographer, but it's not really about war photography.  There's a lot of drinking, girls, and gambling, though.

Robert Capa was a pretty cool dude.

At some point, John Steinbeck shows up needing help with 3 bottles of Algerian schnapps and Ernest Hemmingway ends up in the hospital after a party.  Now and then, Robert Capa takes pictures.

His photographic eye shows through his writing, though.  There is always a subject in frame, and he's always filling in the context for you, leaving out everything you don't need to know.  Believe it or not, that's the hard part of photography -- what to exclude from your photo is just as important as what to include.  It's easy to decide what you want to take a picture of and then point your camera at it and take a picture.  The hard part is drawing the subliminal arrows to lead people's eyes to what it is you really just took a picture of.

It's a conscious decision you have to make in photography, how easy you want to make it on your viewers.  You don't want to play Where's Waldo? with them, but at the same time you don't want to crop everything out and isolate your subject from the world around them.  That's why those shallow depth of field blurred-background photos are so hit or miss sometimes.  Yes, it does require a more expensive camera to produce them -- you need a wide aperture and a big sensor.  They make it easy to figure who your subject is by smoothing out the noise in the background, but sometimes they remove too much, and you're stuck with as much as 75% of a photo being worthless to look at.

Back to Capa.  When you see his work, you'll notice he brings a lot of stuff into focus without losing his message.  There are barely any shots taken wide open -- partially because lenses back then weren't quite at the point where you could shoot at f/1.8, but mostly because the photos he was taking needed the depth of field to place them relative to the rest of the world and what was going on back then.  There is so much going on in his photos that to blur any part of them out would have ruined them.

ICP and Robert Capa

Well, I am now officially a card carrying member of the International Center of Photography.

That's not actually as exciting as it might sound.  It just means I can stroll the gallery whenever I want for free, and I get 10% off coffee at their cafe downstairs.  Sometimes I might get invited to a party or two.

The current main exhibit is "Capa in Color".  It's a collection of Robert Capa's work in color photography.  Robert Capa is much more widely known for his black and white war zone work -- particularly the ones from Omaha Beach on D-Day.  The D-Day stuff is rather blurry, but I am amazed by the idea of him jumping out of an amphibious transport under heavy fire, slogging through the surf, and taking pictures with a Contax rangefinder of some sort, with manual focus and manual exposure.

Anyway, the color stuff has kind of a "downtime" feel to them to me.  Though some of them are still war-related, but for the most part, the restored Kodachrome brings blue to clear skies and bright colors to womens' dresses.  It's more casual, and a lot of it is of people just hanging out.  One of my favorites is "Woman Wearing Dior", of a model in a pink Dior dress standing with a fisherman by the Seine River, with the Eiffel Tower visible in the background.

There's another of Pablo Picasso at the beach in the water with his son Claude.  I guess he was never one to worry about getting salt water in his camera.

A fantastic job was done restoring the color in the photos -- they're as sharp as the day they were shot, and the colors look better than Instagram at its best.  It's definitely worth the $15 admission fee.  Most of them were shot either on a medium format Rolleiflex or on what I'd guess to be a 35 or 50mm lens on 35mm film -- basically, Capa was always right in the middle of everything, and his photos will bring you there.

Robert Capa died in 1954 during the first Indochina War while he was on assignment from Life Magazine with a French regiment.  He jumped out of his jeep to run down the road under fire to get a better shot, and stepped on a landmine.

His brother, Cornell Capa, founded the ICP in 1974.

While I was there, I exercised my new member discount at the gift shop and bought this Kikkerland Cable Photo Holder.  I've been trying to put more photos I've taken up in my room (there are some taken by others mixed in).  Many of them may not actually ever be seen by anyone else.  At first I thought it was a rather narcissistic thing to do, putting my own work up in my own house, but they are there only so I can be confronted with them every day and be reminded to do even better, so I can have new things to put up for myself.  

Every time I see one of my photos, I think, "What if I had been 2 inches to the side?"

It doesn't sound like it would make much of a difference, but in bowling, that's the difference between a strike and a spare.

Cat.

Still trying to get the hang of focusing this thing.

Krappy Kamera 2014

My entry, taken on ISO 100 Kodak Ektar, f/11(?), 1/100s(?)

The photos from the Krappy Kamera competition are on display at the Soho Photo Gallery downtown until March 1st.  My entry (above) didn't make it in, but I highly encourage you to stop by and have a look at the ones that did.  My good friend Jean Miele was the juror for the event, choosing all of the photos you'll see there.  The idea of the whole thing: take a picture with a crappy camera.  You'll see from the entries that it doesn't necessarily result in a crappy picture.  The winner of this year's competition took the winning entry with a jumble of gaffing tape and cardboard with a repurposed hunk of glass at the front.  He didn't even use film.

I went to the reception last Tuesday and got to talk to the winners along with a bunch of other photographers and photo enthusiasts.  There was great conversation and free wine.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Holga 120N, with 60mm f/8 optical lens.

My camera shelf is a schizophrenic jumble of digital and analog gear from across the range, and I love all of them.  My entry was shot on my Holga.  Holgas are light-leaky rattly $30 plastic things from China, usually sold alongside the Lomo cameras and overpriced shitty film at Urban Outfitters.  The film door isn't even attached with a hinge; you have to stick it to the back of the camera with those sliding metal clips.  The shutter time varies depending on the particular Holga (usually somewhere around 1/100s).  You can choose between two apertures: sunny and cloudy (something like f/8 and f/11, but only kind of, because it's just a janky hole drilled through a piece of plastic, so who knows).  The Holga's saving grace is that it shoots onto medium format 120 film, which helps to shrink the plastic lens's rampant aberrations.  Most of the photos at Krappy Kamera were taken on Holgas.

Another one I took that day.  Didn't submit this one.

Every Holga comes with its own set of "special" defects.  As you can see, mine vignettes almost to black in only 3 of the 4 corners.  Another characteristic of the Holga is the extreme radial fringing you get all along the edges of the frame, normally something you'd hate to have in any camera you pay decent money for.  However I kind of like it for certain cases.  If you're shooting something with trees in the background, light filtering through tree leaves tends to be noisy and distracting, but the Holga's fringing has a way of evening it out without blurring it to nothing.  In the photos I took at the beach, I like what it's done to the sand in the foreground; it kind of looks like a motion blur to go with the incoming tide.

I took my entry photo on the first day and developed and scanned it at home that night.  I thought I could do a bit better (the converging lines were a bit wonky), so I decided to go back the next day.  I'd shot the first day on Kodak Ektar and Tri-X, but I didn't have any left for the second day and did not have time to buy more before the deadline.  I broke out a roll of Fuji Velvia, which costs $8, not including the $16 of E-6 processing that only a few photo labs in the city will do.  It's a film I normally reserve for my Fuji GW690ii.  After I reshot and came home, I unloaded the film from the camera, and...

I dropped it.  My fingers were still numb and stiff from the cold, and 120 film is just a loose roll on a plastic spool with a sealing tape to hold it together until you get it developed.  While fumbling around with it, the sealing tape came loose, and the whole roll toilet-papered down to the floor.  So, I was left to submit what I had.

Even though my entry didn't make it into the show, I have absolutely no regrets.  It cost me $30 worth of camera, about $40 worth of film and developer, and a $40 submission fee, along with several hours in the cold with frostbitten fingers and a runny nose, but it was the first time I'd ever set out with a project in mind and a vision to capture, instead of just running around with a camera and snapping up things that look pretty.

I would do it all over again in a heartbeat, and I'm looking forward to returning for Krappy Kamera 2015.

Seoul Part 4: Signs of Life, and Going Home

In the end, like everywhere else, Seoul is just another place to live.  People go to work, eat, sleep, and hang out with friends and family.  If you go to a destination thinking of it as a theme park or museum of some sort, you miss out on the things that truly make it different from home.  For that matter, you also miss out on the things that never change no matter where you are in the world.

I mean, unless that's not your kind of thing.  In which case, by all means have whatever kind of fun you like to have.  This is just why I love to travel.

We left a wintry New York City just as things started to warm up there, and arrived in Seoul just in time for a cold snap.  It stayed in the teens and twenties almost the whole time we were there.

Luckily, a lot of Korean food is designed to be eaten while it's dangerously hot -- often being served still boiling in a heavy stone bowl, or still sizzling on a hot metal plate.  We ate a lot of soups and stews while we were there -- my favorite being sujebi, a seafood and dough dumpling soup, heavily flavored with clams and seaweed.  Also worth looking for are kalguksu (kind of like sujebi, but with thick udon-looking noodles instead of the dumplings), samgaetang (stuffed chicken and ginseng soup), and juk (rice porridge -- yeah, it's called the same thing in Cantonese, but it tends to be thicker and comes with different seasonings).

 

 Oh, and don't forget the aforementioned cafes:

           
Or you can just stay in your hotel room and try to get something delivered.

There's a ton of delivery in Seoul.  Most of it happens via moped and motorcycle.  They go up and down the narrow alleys, through red lights, up onto sidewalks, and sometimes down staircases.  My new camera was delivered to the shop on moped on ten minutes' notice.  Hell, even Burger King in Seoul delivers.  Pizza seems to be a sit-down affair, though.  I've always wanted the chance to order jajangmyun noodle delivery.  The delivery guy shows up with the meal in a heated box on back of his bike.  It comes in a non-disposable bowl that you leave on your doorstep when you're done, and they come pick it up the next day.

We were in Seoul for 9 days and enjoyed all of it in spite of the bitterly cold weather.  It never really felt uncomfortably foreign, and you could pretty much get anything done with a smile and basic English one word at a time.  It kind of reminded me of a gentler, slightly easier-going version of Tokyo.  Everything moved along steadily, but you weren't rushed along or crowded.  I guess it could be because it was winter when we went and like us, most Koreans like to stay inside when it's cold, leaving things relatively uncrowded.  If that's the case, then maybe winter isn't such a bad time to visit.

And that concludes the Seoul series.  I hope you guys got at least a little feel for the enjoyment we had there.  Oh, and I still haven't told you too much about the new camera.  I'd love to go over it in a later post, because it's really cool.  Also, here's the album with the rest of the photos from the Bessa, including some that weren't posted.

Seoul Intermission

Man.  I am tired of thinking of things to write about Seoul.  Here is a cat intermission.