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.