The approach is essentially to find the angle from which I can shoot with being too obvious, use a long lens and a shallow aperture. I have processed to B&W as that is what the bride wanted. This year has been wedding free, no complaints there, although we already have a booking for next May.
Without a bride to play with Heidi was my chosen victim, she gets to suffer many of my photographic experiments. I chose my Samsung NX20 and new 85mm f/1.4 prime. My 5D and 135mm f/2 would have been a better choice, but I wanted something light to carry and unobtrusive, plus I am keen to work more with the 85 and learn it,s capabilities. The lenses large aperture creates dreamy images which still contain good detail. I am beginning to really love the Samsung kit, small and yet very capable. They get overlooked by the photographic press, but there is a lot to say about a lens manufacturer that makes more primes than zooms, especially in the mirrorless category.
I asked Heidi if should would go for a walk with me and permit me every so often to stop and take a few shots. As expected she was very self conscious to start with, something that was hard to shake off. The problem was that it was just her and I, a 3rd person would have meant she would have had someone to talk to and forget about the husband with the camera.
These photographs were taken over a period of about an hour, and although she progressively relaxed it was not really working as every time I took a shot we had to stop and wait for a while. The final shot is the one that I think worked the best. We were leaving the park and I stepped onto a pathway with a car coming. When warned I said I thought the photo was more important and she laughed. Technically not a great image, but it is the most representative of the Heidi that I know. I am not an Avedon that can stare down a subject and reduce them to their inner core. I feel sorry for my subjects and tend to let go too soon.
As I mentioned in the preamble, this was for me an exercise in wedding photography, I am far more interested these days in working street photography in the city. Once again I used my 85 and NX20. This small and discrete system enables me to be almost invisible in the crowd, whilst the wide aperture means that I can pick people out against the chaos of the city streets. These are a few from a week ago
This is much more my scene at the moment. My take on Social Documentary is that the photographer should not impact upon the scene, the subject should be unaware of the photographer. To an extent that means that I taking their photograph in a very literal sense, I am not asking for permission. When I was working on my Oktoberfest photography I found that once people became aware of me the situation changed completely, not always badly, but never to what I wanted to capture. I may change my stance as time passes, let's see.
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