For a little while I thought I was done with street photography, but then I found myself with time to kill, and an RX100 in my pocket. Also, I'm pretty much done and done with the vacation photos.
I like to juggle it back and forth between my hands like I'm idly messing with it while I'm staring up at buildings. It's been a pretty reliable misdirection, and I've learned to aim and shoot it from the hip reasonably reliably from in close. Though, I guess I should try to at least get a vertical composition or two.
I usually leave it at 1600 ISO, f/8, and convert to black and white. I don't even bother with noise reduction.
I spend a lot more time thinking about photography than actually doing photography. The other day I had a bit of a shower-thoughts moment and started wondering:
When you take a photo, are you asking a question, or answering a question?
People always say that when you take a photo, you should be telling a story. Is the story already there when you take the photo, or does it only become a story after you hit the shutter button?
I didn't get around to really thinking it through until now.
The story is there! It's just waiting for the right storyteller to come along and assign it importance in our lives (or our Facebook feeds, for that matter). Think of all the stories you walk past on the way to work -- all they needed was someone to point them out to you. Of course, you have more important things to get to than other people's business. That's where the storyteller comes in. He/she captures the story and puts it into his preferred language, be it words or pictures or song or sculpture. His/her hope is that the audience is able to understand the language.
A good story makes us ask questions we didn't even know we wanted answered, and then leaves us to seek the answers ourselves.
So, to answer the question at hand (at least for me), when a photo is taken, there will be questions, but they are not for the photographer to ask or answer. The photographer is only there to make the questions happen.
Man, I've been back for almost two months now and still haven't gotten through all the posts. It's not because of the film because everything's already developed and scanned. Frankly, it's just sorting through everything and trying to make up some sort of coherent narrative out of everything. Also, I didn't feel like a lot of the photos were particularly good.
Anyway, here's Fushimi Inari, which you may recognize from this photo. It was POURING when we got off the train, which actually turned out to to be a good thing. There was nobody there -- we passed a single couple on our way up, and spent the rest of the time with the rustle of wind in the trees and the patter of rain on our umbrellas.
Metering became a chore after a while, so I just gave up on it entirely and underexposed half of the photos I took. I didn't get that torii tunnel picture because it was heavily overcast, and the lighting was really flat inside.
