August 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullight/8147381264 This Month's Photograph When making candid photographs, it is important to me to get close and become invisible. This feeling was strongly reinforced by a chance encounter that allowed me to observe Garry Winogrand shooting candids at Fanueuil Hall Marketplace in Boston. Working close creates a dramatic perspective that is unobtainable by any other method, especially when using a wide angle lens. I am most comfortable using ones that have an angle of view of 84 -104°, working 3 feet or closer to my main subject. I took this photograph at Honkfest, an annual Columbus Day Weekend event in Somerville, Massachusetts. Initially, working close and being invisible seem contradictory. However, in this situation, it was easy to be invisible. The people in the photograph were getting ready for a parade and were more interested in looking good than than they were in me. I never talked to them or planned to talk to them. I was looking for one moment that expressed what I was seeing. This is a record of that moment. Favorite iPhone Apps ProCamera is an app that allows the user to get the maximum technical quality from an iPhone. I was originally attracted to it for its anti-shake shutter button and its ability to change the photo's aspect ratio. It has a range of other features that I don't currently use but may at some point. These include Rapid Fire, Tiltmeter, and Grids. Rapid Fire is what it sounds like. Tiltmeter allows the user to get the camera completely straight, and the Grids offers a grid view on the screen, much like a classic ground glass grid viewfinder. Notable Website I have been using Flickr since 2006. It is a site for social networking with images, where words aren't exchanged very much. Most of the postings are photographs-by at least one count, 8.6 million photographs per day. I don't see all of them on any given day and of those do I see, I don't like all of them. I enjoy being exposed to the many photographers whose work is not in books, galleries, or museums. I keep a running tab of these photographers at https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullight/favorites/.  I often wonder who they are, and I appreciate that they continue to share their work with the world. One of photographers I like watching is Alan Barr. He has posted over 4,000 photographs since 2005. He can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/abarr. Unlike much of his current photography, his older photographs are in color. They appear to be candids or minimally posed photographs of people who work in a Philadelphia butcher shop. He works in a traditional street photography style pioneered by Henri Cartier Bresson in the 1930s. As he moves toward the present, his cameras and lenses change, but his vision remains consistent. Sometimes I feel that, if Alan hasn't already photographed every person in Philadelphia, he eventually will. He is one of many examples of photographers whose work I would never have seen without Flickr.