Street Photography & RFs - Video

[PatrickT]

I very-much enjoyed his videos also. I've been following him and the other guys in the video for a little while now and I always enjoy their work.

 

[Pickett Wilson]

"his movies are made very perfect"

Yeah, kinda scary to think they were shot with a DSLR!

 

[Wouter Brandsma]

But, I have to make an exception on that. His thought only is true when people do not mind being photographed.

I live in the north of The Netherlands, people are kind of reserved in their nature here. They have a sort of suspiciousness about them and do not like being photographed in general and specifically not in the streets. I've had unpleasant run-ins with people coming up to me and asking why I was taking pictures of strangers. Even strangers to them. I get a lot of people turning away, shielding their faces and even interfering when I try to shoot.

On occasions, I visit Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Utrecht for a day to shoot, so I can at least get some time doing street. But I'll never excell at it unless I move there.

I know exactly what you mean Johan. I live in the center of the Dutch bible belt, Ede, and things are the same here. People are very suspicious, although I haven't had any unpleasant encounters yet. And people all seem to be the same. My town just doesn't have the diversity of a very large city. Making it all more challenging to find interesting characters and making ordinary people look unordinary.

I loved watching his film about street photography and find it very inspiring.

 

[Brad Maestas]

Simply not true. Pressing the desaturate button is a lot easier than processing b&w film and doing some fancy stuff on the mac doesn't even involve washing-up afterwards.😉

www.urbanpaths.net

Does fanciness somehow equal substance? I beg to differ.

Simply desaturating is the worst way to convert to monochrome. Any subtleties in tone or contrast are lost. Far better is the use of CS3's B&W tool that lets you control every aspect of the tone.

I have been shooting chromogenic B&W lately (mainly Kodak BW400CN and Ilford XP2) and I couldn't think of anything easier than taking it to my trusty local minilab and having decent scans ready in an hour. I spend much less time on the computer this way and it leaves me more time to do other things like shoot. Even when I shoot trad B&W and churn some soup I love the whole process so I see it more as a privilege than a nuisance. I'm looking forward to making a proper darkroom in the future and getting back into wet printing which is where it all began for me. I loved making prints.

Regarding the vid, yeah, it's a pretty big Leica love-fest. I liked the photos by Severin Koller and Frank Jackson the most. Also interesting to see the results of the 5DMkII with all the extra goodies.

 

[Brad Maestas]

I'm not convinced mind you about some of the narration. It's full of lovely sounding references to 'truth' and the 'human condition' but this for example just does not stand up:

''In the kind of photography we're talking about here the actual is not at all transformed.'' [begining of part 3]

If it was not at all transformed, it would not be possible to view it on a flat surface. I think I know what Chris Weeks means, but he really should be more careful than that.

www.urbanpaths.net

I noticed that this was part of a quote from James Agee. Used as narration here it is obviously out of context but being that it is about photography in the first place, it does seem a bit perplexing. I do agree that the narration was sometimes a bit convoluted and pretentious.