amateriat
We're all light!
This is why I very quickly gave up on using the adjustable LCD on my Olympus C-8080 for a few "stealth" shots: if anything, I felt more conspicuous trying to sneak a shot of someone (allegedly) unawares. Now, I just go with the Winogrand School, whose principle is that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Some people do get bent out of shape at your taking their picture (which, of course, is their right), but I usually point out to those (very) few who call me out, that (1) the moment they step out their front door, in the 21st Century, they are in play (for better or worse), and (2) if they don't believe this, they should take count of all the security cameras they encounter whenever entering an office building, transit station, taxi, or even the corner bodega. Taking their picture, entirely without their permission.
Enough soap-box stuff.
One feeling of "freedom" a TLR offers is not to have the feeling of squinting "through a lil' 'ole", to quote a well-known photographer (well, better-known than me, anyway). Unfortunately, this "freedom" comes at the expense of an uncorrected left-right image on the groundglass, requiring a bit of magical thinking on the part of the photographer (not a huge problem for those who shot with nothing but TLRs back in the day), but more of a problem for someone like me who cut his teeth on highfalutin SLRs and natty pocket 35s with all known techy creature-comforts.
For me, "freedom", such as it is, came from a relative simplification of my Main Axe setup: Going from a pair of heavy, obviously tech-laden AF SLRs, with a sextet of great but heavy and huge glass, to a pair of RFs and a trio of good but much smaller glass, all of which I could carry in one modest-sized bag, whenever and wherever I pleased, and with great ease. Things got even better recently when I got a used Contax Tvs, which I take almost every time I head out the door these days, and is a hell of a lot of fun, as well as being a cracking-great piece of compact gear.Between my Hexar system and this little camera, 95% of my picture-taking gets done, and it's never a drag. For me, that's where the interesting stuff gets started.
Flushing Avenue Elevated, Brooklyn, NY, October 2009. (Woodhull Hospital in background)
(Technical: Contax Tvs, Ilford XP-2 Super)
In the end you go with what inspires you, and ultimately doesn't get too much in the way. We sometimes worry that our equipment makes things "too easy", when what really hangs us up, IMO, is the plethora of options, leading to a kind of creative gridlock. For myself, I place the origins of this "problem" to the development of multi-mode AE options in 35mm cameras a few decades back. But that's just me.
- Barrett
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