Hi Gang, First, let me tell you I'm happy to see that you're all willing to call a spade a spade. Wish we all could do that more often. Second, let me remind you that I never said this picture is good, I said I keep coming back to it. And I do, but I don't know why. Technically it's crap, but there's something there that grabs me. There's probably something deep in my unconscious that makes a connection, and Eric may have some good points on that idea. A lot of HCB's early pictures aren't great technically, but there's something in those that grabs me. In HCB's case they grab a lot of other people too, and this picture never is going to do that. I'm not going to make any excuses for it, and on balance I agree I probably shouldn't have posted it. On the other hand, considering the honest responses, I guess I'm not sorry I did.
But I need to go back to the Fort Myers shot. I don't know how many of you have done street, but I'll tell you that when you see a shot like that one you usually have less than a second before it's gone. You don't have time to focus before you shoot, so you pre-focus, and then when the picture pops up you just lift the camera and shoot. Sometimes -- often -- the focal point is a bit off. All you can do is hope that DOF will make up the difference, so it's "f/8 and be there." Usually it's close enough, because this isn't landscape. The important thing is the picture, not it's technical perfection. In fact, I'll go way out on a limb and say that unless you're in a studio shooting for advertising, technical perfection never is as important as the composition and the content.
