For your consideration

[amolitor]

At the best of the local coffee shops.

[Bruce Cox]

I enjoy looking at it.   Maybe it's my evening drink, but I am very comfortable gazing across it without feeling the need to be judgmental.  The picture is well structured and informative without loudly claiming to be clever, so I don't feel a need to argue with it.   Some of the credit for this may go to the shop, though finding and showing what passes for real life is a good use of photography in my humble opinion. 

Bruce

[RSL]

Andrew, I've been struggling with this one for a while. It's a good stab at street photography, but what I see is a guy making change or taking an order in the foreground and a guy waiting for the coffee to finish in the background. I don't see a story. On the other hand, it's an interesting environmental shot, more documentary than street. It's the kind of picture that needs words to go with it. It's always good to see somebody try his hand at street photography. As far as I'm concerned, that's where the real action is.

[amolitor]

Thanks, Russ! Especially for taking the time to struggle.

I've been studying "street" in an academic sort of way pretty seriously for a few months, and I've spent a few visits to the coffee shop observing and thinking about how one might shoot it. A coffee shop is nice, the layout and the operation force the same human interactions, the same glances and sightlines, the same geometries, to occur over and over.

This is actually my very first serious effort, I think this one is exposure #9, and I felt it was the least uninteresting of the lot. Getting the mystery and story is much much harder than it looks! I can tell the coffee-shop story easily -- here is a guy making coffee, here is a guy taking an order. Telling a better story... I think I have to lose the staff and work on customers, who are far less predictable!

I see now that I need to be a lot more mobile, the geometry in play here places the two men back to back, mirrored, and the camera should have been higher to clarify that. HCB was right, it turns out. Go figure!

Not sure I'll pursue it further, but even one time out in an easy, easy location, was very very instructive about the form. There are a couple of those repeated glances that I am itching to try to nail, too.

[amolitor]

Thank you, Bruce! Your reaction isn't really what I was hoping for, but I am pleased as punch to have accomplished that much. Anything other than 'what, now?' is pretty much gravy for me.

[RSL]

You're right, Andrew, there's nothing easy about street photography, which is one reason why it's worth doing. Keep shooting. You'll miss often, and you'll spend a lot of time working at it and failing, but there'll come a time when you trip the shutter and realize, as HCB put it, that you've "got something." There's hardly any gut feeling in life as exhilarating as that realization.

[Rob C]

You're right, Andrew, there's nothing easy about street photography, which is one reason why it's worth doing. Keep shooting. You'll miss often, and you'll spend a lot of time working at it and failing, but there'll come a time when you trip the shutter and realize, as HCB put it, that you've "got something." There's hardly any gut feeling in life as exhilarating as that realization.

That's the best reason in the world for using really good models. There's absoliutely nothing like it when you get a session with more ups than downs, and you realise that you've made it happen, between you. Stealing or grabbing isn't the same juice: it's reaction and not creation.

;-)

Rob C

[RSL]

Rob, I've seen enough of your beautiful work to understand where you're coming from, but you'd have a hard time convincing HCB, Robert Frank, Andre Kertesz, Chim, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Brassai, Walker Evans, Elliott Erwitt, Dorothea Lange, Gene Smith, Marc Riboud, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, or the curators of The Met, or MOMA of that.