Light?

This is another in the series of large format street images. No question that these are rather difficult to take. The size of the camera is an obviously limiting factor, but the focus is a real problem. Not only does one need to figure out the exposure, but also focus in on an area where something of interest might happen. It was a fun experiment that gave me a chance to try to overcome some pretty steep challenges, which is always fun.

Decision Time

I was in Pittsburgh early for the F295 Conference and it was a hot, beautiful day. So what do we all do in that situation? Of course, we get the tripod, large format camera, and shoot street photography.

Okay, perhaps that is not the first thing that might come to mind, but I have slowly evolved from being one who thought that I might be too timid to shoot on the street, to one who has no problems with it.

Street photography is not intuitive when one is shooting large format. I can set things up rather quickly, and even so it will take several minutes to get things ready to go. As street photography is normally about reacting very quickly to a situation, these two seldom come together. When shooting large format street photography, I normally set the camera up by areas where people will be, like bus stops and street corners. In this particular instance, this family had been standing in this location for a while, trying to decide something, so that gave me time to set things up and take the picture. As I turned the film holder around to take a second shot, they decided that they were apparently in my way and moved. I thought about how funny it would have been to turn the camera to their new location.

Live I said, it was a bit hot, so I decided that one way to print this would be to utilize the lith printing process. This gives me increased contrast and the wonderful yellow color seen on the print.