A good friend and I took a "photo tour" in DC today - we were the only ones who didn't know much about shooting outside of automatic mode! The theme of the tour was "street photography" - taking pictures of strangers! I loved it and was stressed out by it at the same time. And now I just want to go do it again.
There were many levels of challenge to this - being confident enough to snap pictures of strangers (and deal with some of the consequences), composing the picture, and then trying to practice using manual settings. I got home and saw how overexposed and overly bright my pictures were and it finally clicked - my aperture is too low (am I right
Kristina?!).
Despite almost all of these being too bright (and me not knowing how to save my edits in picasa when I try to increase the shadows), here are the few shots that I liked. This first one is the only successful candid shot I got - all the rest of these but one other were after I asked permission. Keep in mind that my lens does not zoom at all, so I have to be UP IN PEOPLE'S FACES. Little stressful. But I LOVED it. I want to be the next
sartorialist.
If only you could hear the soul music blasting from his boombox. He was such a nice man, what a sweetheart.
Out of focus! That's the other thing - I can't manually focus fast enough under the pressure I feel to snap a quick picture. I put the camera into autofocus shortly after this.
Too bright!
I like the shot of this man, but it would be nice to see what the protest signs behind him said, right?
And my lovely friend Kim, with whom I took the class (and whose great pictures you can check out on her
blog!) wouldn't be so washed out if I just learned to play around with that "f" number!
And this nice man, whose gelato Kim tried to steal, would be in focus, rather than his shirt, if I had changed that f-stop. Right?
Live and learn (I say that a lot on this blog), but now that it "clicked" I'm dying to run outside and try again. In Baltimore, at 9:30 at night, we are not going to do that though. Patience.
I just need a new excuse now when I try to take strangers' pictures again now. Tell them I'm taking pictures for my fabulous fashion blog? Ha! Or I need a stealth zoom lens...
