THE ART OF STICKING AROUND
I lived in Paris in 2001. The Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore announced a visit by Lawrence Ferlinghetti the legendary beat generation publisher and owner of San Francisco’s City Lights books. I showed up early excited to meet and photograph Ferlinghetti
LEICA VS PHONE
The Leica M is my main street shooting camera. I can shoot while staying nearly invisible to my subjects. Nearly invisible, but not quite. There are times when even the Leica can be too conspicuous, especially when shooting very close, or around overly-sensitive subjects with control issues. When the Leica is too much camera I […]
LEICA M10-D ALMOST ANALOG
The Leica M10-D is essentially an analog camera with a digital sensor. There is no viewing screen and the camera was designed to be the same size as the Leica M6 film camera. There is even a winding lever on the camera. It doesn’t cock the shutter though. Its only function is to act as […]
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
Strategies and exercises for photographing strangers in the street. The key to all people photography is access. A street photography skill you’ll need to master is how to approach subjects in different situations, in ways that let you keep shooting without losing access to the subject. Here are some strategies you can use. Full permission […]
NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
This photo got me thinking about negatives. I made the shot in Indiana when I was a teenager. We’d moved there from Alaska during my senior year of high school. It was dusk, and the negative is thin. I didn’t even notice the photo at the time. So the negative sat there, and sat there, […]
WORTH THE WAIT
Street shooting requires an instantaneous reaction to what you are seeing. It’s this need to react immediately to whatever is happening on the street, in the moment, that excites me the most when I’m shooting. I usually don’t wait for a picture to happen. I prefer to move into situations rather than stand still and […]
GOING MANUAL
See these lessons from the days of film photography that will make you a better digital shooter. I grew up shooting manual cameras. There was no Google back then and it took time and effort to get information about shooting skills. But the information was there. Experienced photographers taught us what they knew through books, […]
WORKING INSIDE
Shooting on the inside – Working your way in. One of the advantages of Leicas over bigger and noisier cameras is they let me work on the “inside” of situations. Working with wide angle lenses it’s possible for me to stand in the middle of, or very close to the situation I’m photographing without disturbing […]
IN THE BAG
I have the perfect Leica camera bag. Because it hasn’t been made for twenty years, out of paranoia the bag will wear out, I keep buying other bags. They always disappoint me and end up hanging empty on hooks on my wall. Years ago, the suitcase and travel bag company, Eagle Creek, made a small […]
TRAVELING LIGHT
I really love being there. I almost always hate getting there. I like air travel because it gets me where I want to go quickly. I don’t like air travel for every other reason I can think of. I won’t bother mentioning them. You know what they are. Well, I will mention one. Baggage and […]