It’s National Jelly Bean Day. Who can resist a handful of jelly beans on? I sure can’t! Well on April 22nd each year, you really don’t have to resist at all!
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Street photography is a photography genre that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. .—Wikipedia
In a previous post about photographing people, I wrote that “…the thought of photographing strangers terrified me.” That statement referred to an assignment that Jack Wilgus, my professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, gave to his Intermediate Photography students in the wayback times. Sadly, these feelings are just as much true for me today as they were when I was a student. Nevertheless, my interest in street photography was rekindled by Craig Whitehead’s incredible book . (You can read my review of it in Joe’s Book Club here.) I didn’t say I was good at it; just that I’m interested and trying…
Weather or Not
As my pal Barry Staver and I wrote in our book ne way you can make your photographs stand out from the crowd’s is to shoot when the weather is less than photographer-friendly. By that we meant shooting in the rain, snow and fog. (It was snowing when I originally wrote this.) I must confess that currently I don’t always drag my sorry butt out into inclement weather but sometimes I do and sometimes the images are worthwhile and sometimes they are not.
For example, I remember getting soaking wet shooting Formula I cars in the pouring rain while standing on the roof of the pit garages at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway trying to capture the cars and their resultant rooster tails. Were the photographs any good? Some were OK and most were not that great but I did feel like a big-time photojournalist standing out there getting soaked to the skin. And then there was the time, that I documented in my Stupid Photographer’s Tricks series, when I was in Tokyo standing, yet again, in the pouring rain and photographing a beautiful female TV broadcaster; She was protected by a big umbrella; I was not. Were my pictures any good? They were OK but she smiled at me and that, my friend, was gratification enough. The lens I used at the time—a Canon EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM zoom—did not fair as well and failed to survive this soggy experience. Me? I got soaked. You can read about all that stupidity HERE and see one of the photographs that I made.
How I Made this Image: Like me, the gentleman holding the umbrella who I photographed in Tokyo was waiting for a bus just as it began to rain. Unlike me, his bus arrived before mine. My umbrella? It was safely dry at home in Colorado.
The camera I used to make this image was a Canon EOS Digital Rebel with an EF 18-55mm kit lens. The exposure was 1/100 sec at f/7.1 at ISO 400 with a minus two-thirds stop exposure compensation. It was shot in Program mode, which is my default exposure choice when attempting street photography. It was originally shot as a color JPEG, which was before my current RAW+JPEG regimen, and converted to black and white using Silver Efex. For this image, I prefer the monochrome look.
Pick up a copy of Craig Whitehead’s book . from amazon for around twenty bucks. As I say in my review “It might move you out of your comfort zone. Who knows it could change your photography and maybe your life,”