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Author Topic: Lunch  (Read 766 times)

Rajan Parrikar

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Re: Lunch
« Reply #20 on: October 30, 2021, 08:22:36 am »

Russ,

Composition is an important part of what distinguishes a very good photograph from a great photograph regardless of the genre. This is what Eric and I were critiquing. Now, I perfectly understand that in the Street genre, one often doesn't have the luxury of carefully selecting the frame, that things happen quickly, and so on.


Hi Rajan,

I’m always interested to hear your opinion because I truly respect the photography you do.

But, and this is a big but: I see very few people on LuLa doing street photography. I see a few doing what they think is street, but it’s rarely what the history of photography has defined as street photography. There isn’t any good definition of street photography in words. To know what it is you have to go back to its originators, the people who started doing it when the Leica first came out and we moved beyond tripods, inverted viewing screens, and covering your head to keep out the light while you focused. I made an attempt to define real street in words with https://luminous-landscape.com/on-street-photography/, but no definition in words really succeeds.

If you’re doing street photography you normally have about three seconds, often less, to frame, focus, and make your shot. Sometimes you’ll frame and focus and wait for the action to reach the point you want in your picture. In the end, you toss a vast number of failures for every success.

So, be careful when you criticize real street photography. What you see may not be exactly what you’d like to see, but if it gets its message across then it’s successful. And there’s always a message of some kind in street photography. If it’s good street, the message often is ambiguous. I talked about that and gave an example in http://www.russ-lewis.com/essays/OnMeaning.pdf.

In any case, I’ve been trying to show some real street photography by posting here. I suspect I’ve not been successful in getting the message across, but I’m going to keep trying, at least for a while.

RSL

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Re: Lunch
« Reply #21 on: October 30, 2021, 08:54:58 am »

Fair enough. But it's not "not often," it's "never."
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