I went for an aimless walk with my camera after this morning's Pilates lesson as part of the "Trust the Process" activity. I didn't really have a particular starting point but thought I might try a little street photography. I know there are a lot of fears around street photography, or at least feeling uncomfortable about taking candid shots of people. I always feel very conspicuous. There weren't many people about (it's a small town in a rural area, not a bustling metropolis), so I went and stood on the bridge over the railway in the hopes of finding some people doing interesting things at the station. While I was standing there with my camera, an elderly lady approached me and asked in a friendly way what I was photographing. I said, "I don't really know" and explained I was doing an online project and it's about the process, not the endpoint. And it turned out she's an artist, and she knew exactly what I meant and we had a nice unexpected chat about the technicalities of artistic processes needing to get out of the way of your creativity. It's amazing how encounters like this happen: I'm not the sort of person who readily connects with strangers, so it seems really odd to meet someone like this when I was doing what I was doing. After she'd gone, I noticed a group of ladies waiting for a train and took one or two shots. They were beginning to clock me, but then I realised that the lens I happened to have with me - a 24-70mm zoom - has such a wide angle when it isn't zoomed, I could actually take photos of them while not pointing the lens directly at them. That gave me a bit of an epiphany, and I realised if I focused my camera on the middle distance, set it to a fast enough shutter speed and used an aperture that would give a decent depth of field, I could take photographs without looking through the viewfinder, and without anybody even knowing I was taking photographs at all. So I had a walk around the town, with the camera hanging around my neck, just quietly pressing the shutter. The photographs (which are not being shared) are not wonderful, but the technique definitely has potential. I consider this to be a productive experience.

Posted by Jane Kerr - Still Life host at 2023-11-03 22:39:30 UTC