The thermometer outside my kitchen window inched up to 18C this lunchtime AND I saw a robin hopping across the lawn. Would it be overly optimistic to believe that Spring has sprung on the 9th March on this part of the north shore of Lake Ontario, Canada. This is unseasonably balmy and everyone knows it won't last. Anyway, the point here is that the lure of crowded city streets beckons strongly to this street photographer who has been cooped up away from icy thoroughfares at home, for far too long.
I have enjoyed looking for photo projects in the house, but soon it is the time to really start using my camera again. For me, the theatre of the streets, with all its vibrant chaos & unpredictability, is where it's at. Out on the streets, I feel as though I detach myself from my own reality---moving into a bubble may be an analogy. I feel that I become hyper observant to all that is going on around me--yet, for the most part being separate from what is in front of the lens--the proverbial fly on the wall. Apart from difference in air temperature, the warm days of Spring & especially hot Summer days, there is a difference in the way people on the street behave and conduct themselves according to the seasons. In Winter, everyone seems to be in a hurry, intent, with head down and for the most part uncommunicative, huddled & bunched up in their Canada Goose for warmth.
Come the lazy, hazy warm days & evenings, the boulevardiers, poseurs and flaneurs (why are all these words taken from French?) take to the streets, lounge in the open street restaurants, or just cruise the fashionable tourist areas in their Rollers, Ferraris and Lamborghinis. These high flyers, clearly seem to occupy a different realm than the rest of us ordinary struggling mortals, making for such rich street photography picking, as they so willingly & confidently parade their material success. They love being photographed!
I have been an active street photographer in Toronto for about 6/7 years and I now sense the changes, apart from just being older, that are taking place inside me. In my early years of photographing the street, I would return home hungry, after a full day & tired legs with 150-200 shots and then the next day have a real struggle to pare down my haul to perhaps 50 keepers, and then with superhuman effort, hit the delete button again to reduce the keepers to say 25 that I thought were 'amazing'. I used to really fall in love with the results of my days on the street. By last season, things had evolved, so that as I readied myself for street action, I was prepared to have just a single 'good' shot from an entire days session. Would have been satisfying to have captured 5 keepers, but just a single, of which I was totally proud, would be an acceptable reward for a full days effort. I take comfort in the fact that a similar outcome also worked the same for Cartier Bresson, the father of street photography---he took many more than 100,000 shots on film during his career and secured his immortality with perhaps less than 200 genius quality photos---a catch rate of fractions of one per cent.
Notes on photos above in this posting:
#1. Lady on zebra crossing. Early evening, had just been raining. She was crossing very slowly at this high vehicle volume and dangerous location. She knows that she does not have the speed or athleticism to jump clear of aggressive and dangerously driven cars. Her rather sad face and reliance on her walking stick likely reflected a difficult existence.
#2. Street musician. This old man frequently plays his one string and very squeaky Chinese instrument outside McDonalds, Yonge Street, Toronto, one of many artists who perform on the major thoroughfares during the summer months. I was drawn to this photo opportunity as the player had masked his face in that unusual face garb/mask often favoured by Chinese ladies who wish to retain pale skin. Not sure if the blackened face mask benefited his earning potential. Note: photographer is mirrored in the window to the right of the musician.
#3. Day after grand opening of our new centre city cannabis emporium. Sizing up the lady against the wall for a shot, when suddenly an arm pushed through the main door and into my picture. I like the pic--totally unplanned---just like much in street photography it happens in the blink of an eye and is gone. No repeat performances. Motto: always carry the camera switched on, finger on the release, with settings locked in.
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Last week of March and woke up to an inch of snow on the front lawn. Hurried through my breakfast time chores to take my last photo of a "white snow scene" for this season.... & there it was----gone! So quickly a steady spring rain downpour had washed it all away. With plans askew, but not to be thwarted on this another day of Covid 19 virus lock-down, I began a prowl around the house to spot something--anything, to set my lens upon. With a morning cup of coffee on my mind, this photographer's eyes alighted on our stylish red kettle. While the water boiled, I looked at it from a variety of angles. On initial examination it appeared rather blah, unexciting, unappealing. With a few sips of that hot, life sustaining liquid coursing through the old veins, ideas as to how I could tackle the project started to flood in. It quickly seemed apparent that this would have to be a macro photography project in order for me to move in close enough to capture small details of the kettle & to register them large on the sensor. My self set guideline is that the finished work would be abstract, such that I could ask you, the viewer, to identify the subject, and you would be unable to do so. Often the small details are much more enthralling than the full subject. But wait---before, proceeding, experience has taught me that I should take a cloth with a small amount of detergent to give the outside of the kettle a real deep clean and polish--rubbing away microscopic particles and smears in corners that had been missed as part of our regular kitchen hygiene routine. Time spent in macro photography cleaning and preparing the subject in advance saves multiples of that (wasted) time in post processing making good a shoddy set-up.
