Street Photography & RFs - Video

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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