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.
