techniques of street snap shot...?

no_doubt_kit said:
may i ask further question?
R2 is center-weighted average metering.
during metering, i should point to the most brightest in the scene?
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NO,

1st) the Center Weight is oblong from Center Top to Bottom. The bottom having a wider base. Like a cone setting on the wide part.

2nd) Try to have a CENTER VERICAL (the width of the RF Spot) reading with some highlight and mid tones. (let the mid-tones have more than 50% of center cone area.

3rd) If you have less Mid tone to Shadow. Put a bit more highlight in the Center Vertical area.

The meter does measure the whole field, but weight the CENTER VERTICAL area with the tonal ranges you want.

Also, Negative film is very forgiving, but include highlights to make sure you get good detail in them.

If you metered just highlights, they may go to dark, So, you can take 2 readings. 1 for shadows and 1 for highlights, than average the two. BUT this works better with a spot or partial spot metering.
 
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The times and f stop I suggested were just from my personal experience. Most of my street shots fall around that 1/125 and f8 with 400 speed film. The good thing about that speed though is its just one flick down or one flick up on the shutter speed dial for most street stuff and you stay in a safe zone going to a slower speed to still stop some motion and going up is naturally a good thing so its win win.

Yes its not for everything, but a couple years experience says it works good enough for most stuff.
 
Roel said:
So if you guys are overexposing the film (250 @ 400ASA) I guess the film has to be develloped at 400 ASA. Or is there also use for exposing a 400 asa film at 250ASA and then develloping it at 250ASA?

Roel
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Roel,
You might find Fred Picker's book, The Zone VI Workshop, helpful. It's been out of print for a while but used copies can be had for only a few dollars.
Film's "box'" speed is measured in the lab under controlled conditions. Out here in the real world there are many variables that weren't taken into account. These include, but are not limited to, variations in meter sensitivity (it's not uncommon for them to vary plus or minus 1½ stops), and variations in shutter speeds ( plus or minus one third of a stop is considered acceptable, old or inexpensive cameras can be much more). Sometimes the variations cancell each other out but more often than not, adjustments of the exposure index must be made. In the two Nikon's that I had, Tri-X was rated 200 in the F and 250 in the F2 to get the equivalent exposure on the negative. You can take someone else's word for the "correct" speed ( for them with their camera), you can use the trial and error method, or you can do the simple testing in the book.....your choice.
 
Hi Gary and all,

Fred Picker's Zone VI Workshop is among my photography books, and I visited him in Vermont a lot of years ago! As for now, I expose Fuji Superior 200 at 160... and Kodak 400 C41 process at 360... in a variety of lighting situations, with several different cameras.

I've found a 1-hour Lab in a nearby shopping mall that does decent dev+scans at modest cost. For Tri-x or HP5 Plus, I'd have to develop my own again, and that would be a first in a dozen years.

So, I'm for reducing the variables that Gary mentions... and for having more time for street shooting. For sure, I'll want to know how a specific emulsion behaves with a favorite lens... in a camera, whose shutter speeds I can rely on.
It IS likely that I'll return to my own B & W development soon [yikes, what is happening to me?!?]. Thus, exposure-development tests make sense.

Cheers, mike
 
Just as a reply to the person who suggested befriending people first to disarm them etc. While I think this is an interesting approach and may very well suit a lot of people, I think the tradition of street photography is much more of an anonymous grab a shot of people while they don't know you are taking it kind of thing. That Joel Meyerwitz video mentioned is a good illustration of this.

I think telling people what you are doing undermines the sense of serendipity that the best street photography captures and veers more into portraiture that happens to take place on the street. It's a fine but important distinction.

Nothing wrong with this, but I don't think the discussion of metering, focusing and shooting quickly really has much to do with that type of approach as you've already tipped your hat so to speak, why not take an extra moment to meter and focus and compose your portrait.

You can be obvious and not sneaky which I agree people sense without being explicitly friendly or disarming. You're basically doing what you do and they are doing what they do in a public space.
 
mike goldberg said:
Hi Gary and all,

Fred Picker's Zone VI Workshop is among my photography books, and I visited him in Vermont a lot of years ago!
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Mike,
When did you visit Fred? I went to one of the Zone VI workshops at Putney in (I think) 1980. Had a great time and learned a lot.
My apologies to the rest of you for hijacking this thread and taking it on a tangent.:angel:
 
Now we've moved beyond technique [or behind it].
I do NOT feel good about myself, when behaving "sneaky.'

The shot below was made earlier this week using
the Canon S410 digicam. A dozen, or so people including
me, were waiting for medical tests. I saw the obese man;
I have a presentation due in June on Obesity.

This is not a picture that I shall publish, and it is presented
here as dark... rather than bright, intentionally. To make
the two shots, I faced the wall, with the man on my right.
ISO was set on 400, and in the S410, Manual shows me
green rectangles on the monitor... for what is in sharp focus.

NO one saw me make the two shots, sort of from the hip.
"Breathe, Mike," I told myself. Done. The choice here is:
Be sneaky [discreet is nicer], or no picture.

Feedback welcome. Cheers, mike
 

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Splendid set of suggestions about techniques. I'll just add a few of my personal observations and thoughts, mostly of philosophical nature.

I like to understand the dynamics of the people in the places I photograph... Observe the dynamics of the people in a city around 8:30 am in the morning, and how dramatically these evolve over time. Look a little further on, and we find completely different dynamics around lunch-time, and then again around 5:00 pm. All this is certainly on a gigantic macroscopic scale, and at a sufficiently high level things become quite predictable. However, the abnormal in this relatively predictable environment makes for the most interesting and the eye-catching scenes. For instance, a backpacker studying a map in front of the union station in Chicago is clearly the odd man out at 8:30 am. Seldom are such oddities found, but misfits abound, providing nice studies in contrasts. The key is to know where to find them and when.

Sometimes I like to simply take a walk without a camera, try to feel the rhythm of the city, to enjoy the sights and sounds around me, ponder, and wonder. It is something like a mentally enriching tour, somewhat in the spirit of Virginia Woolf's ``The London Scene.'' It helps to understand, and in general predict. Sometimes I can predict an incident/scene long before it happens; I position myself, prepare the camera with all settings and focussing, and then enjoy like an Olympian god as the scene unfolds in front of me just as I had constructed a priori. Of course more often than not, random events change the course of the event, but those too are interesting, and give new insights in addition to being frustrating to some extent 🙂 In short, the more time I spend behind understanding the people, the better are the prospects of clinching scenes of interest, or even of daily life with sufficient soul in them that they stand out as photographs.

Enough said, now it's time to stop, wonder, and shoot 🙂

Just another little nudge, i.e., something to wonder internally... are ``street photographs'' limited to photographs on the street? Or is it about life... no matter what the venue? 🙄 (NB: I don't want to start a debate on this.)
 
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My take on street shooting is, it's just as much an art form as other types of photography, and composition absolutely still matters, so if you have to sneak around to get the picture, chances are it won't turn out good enough to actually use. That's not to say I haven't tried shooting without looking through the VF, because I have, but I try to come away with at least a few that are composed properly and nice to look at...
 
My best streetshooting is w/ my 25 Canon set at f5.6 and 8 feet on my Model P. that gives me a hyperfocal distance of 5 to 23 feet.
 
If you're good at visualizing what the camera will see, the viewfinder can be superfluous. I think the art of street photography comes not so much from "proper composition" but from the content of the moment. Similarly "sneaky" I think is more a way of going about your photography, not anything inherent in taking photos anonymously.

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MadMan2k said:
My take on street shooting is, it's just as much an art form as other types of photography, and composition absolutely still matters, so if you have to sneak around to get the picture, chances are it won't turn out good enough to actually use. That's not to say I haven't tried shooting without looking through the VF, because I have, but I try to come away with at least a few that are composed properly and nice to look at...
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