The last couple of weeks it doesn’t seem there was much time
for photographing. My father was
admitted to a nursing home and I’ve been spending time with mom getting
everything sorted out. I did do some shooting around the neighborhood, but there was nothing in my schedule to fulfill the requirements for this exercise.
This weekend, though, was
my birthday and we found a day to get out and enjoy a bit of the overheated
outdoors. A visit to the weekly Saturday
farmer’s market turned out to be a perfect opportunity to document the use of the SLR as a video
camera, the intention being to raise awareness of how shots are chosen.
The first sequence here shows the first seven images shot as
entering the park. About the time I
pointed my camera at the sign board, a jazz band launched the morning’s first
set. My camera followed. The last two shots are near identical. You might notice the last is shot from a
slightly lower angle. Because of my
191cm height, many people shots have a downward looking angle, for which I have
to sometimes compensate by squatting or kneeling. Unfortunately, my knees are growing weaker as
I grow older.
The second sequence shows me narrowing in on a basket of
veggies. I’m not sure what caught my
attention about this particular stall. I
know I was looking for opportunities on that side of the path as that’s where
sunlight was falling. Perhaps it was the
baskets that caught my eye, and perhaps they did so because there were no
people blocking my view. You’ll notice also
the final image has been cropped.
Implications? If you tend to shoot sparingly, this might be
a useful exercise for demonstrating to yourself how a freer use of the camera
might help you spot photograph opportunities. What I found here is that some of
my more interesting shots of the day were not ones that I developed, but ones
that caught me, like the one of the boy, shot from the hip while walking through
the crowd, or the one of the pavilion and lake, a view that literally stopped
me in my tracks.
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