A number of the photographs I took in Manchester were taken with my compact Ricoh camera at my side, set to silent shutter, operating the shutter with my thumb, with a wide focal length and a preset shutter speed of 1/125th second. Not all of them worked successfully, of course; several need a bit of manipulation to make them ‘presentable’; and there were no ‘stars’, as I said in the last post. As far as I could tell, this was the only way I was genuinely going to get close-in candid shots of the sort of ‘moments’ I wanted without making the subject aware, which would defeat the point of the shot in the first place. However, I have sensed some ‘disapproval’ f this methodology and, interestingly, when I put the pictures up on Flickr, someone asked whether the one of the guy in a blue jacket with a walking stick was a ‘hip shot’, which also made me feel a bit sensitive about the methods I’d used.
So, I posted a question amongst fellow students in the Flickr Group to canvas opinion. The discussion is here http://www.flickr.com/groups/ocarts/discuss/72157625836731317/ I’m not entirely sure how much this has helped. In the context of this course, it is important to show that I can handle a variety of methods to get the results I’m looking for. I need to do more work with the DSLR, of that I’m quite sure, but I should probably stop beating myself up over the ones that I took surreptitiously. Think of Walker Evans with his camera under his coat on the NY Metro! Don’t think I want to go that far, but if I can get decent quality shots this particular way as part of my work, then I don’t see that it matters.
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