Early in June I walked around my hometown of Cochrane, Alberta mid-afternoon for an hour and snapped these four photos using Gail my Fuji GA 645 medium format point-n-shoot camera. I used Fuij NPS160 film.
©Darwin Wiggett - Cochrane Main Street with approaching storm
©Darwin Wiggett
©Darwin Wiggett
©Darwin Wiggett
© Sagi Kortler
1/250 sec at f/5.6 ISO 400
This picture was taken in Jerusalem, at Mamilla center which is a small shopping mall right outside the old city that has a centered outdoor boulevard that features art work (mostly sculptures) along it. I passed through that center on my way to the old city when that sculpture/mask caught my eye. I stood there for a while, waiting for someone interesting to pass by or stand next to it but nothing happened so after about 30 minutes or so I moved on and walked to the old city.
On my way back I passed there again to see if I can get anything and there this guy was leaning like that against the wall. I immediately saw the resemblance of the guy mouth to the sculpture and just got close to the scene, snapped the photo and kept walking.
I use a wide 24mm lens on a full frame body for most of my street photography and I get really close, with this technique the subjects usually are not aware that they being photographed, this was also the case here. The guy is not looking at the camera but looking at me and what I’m doing, this results in a kind of gaze that goes beyond the camera which I really like. ~ Sagi Kortler
Nikon D700 24 mm lens 1/100s @ f/4.5 ISO
This photograph is from a series called “The Queen’s Living Room“. One week shooting on Queen Street from East to West. I wanted to show this oldest East/West street, and all its contrasts in human moments. From stylish people who look like stars, to the strange and lost, looks like Queen street will always be the same. This photograph took me 15 minutes to find. I saw the man, earlier on the other corner of Younge and Queen, but the photograph I took of him wasn’t good. Then I saw this woman smoking alone. I thought of a picture but abandoned the idea. I went away for 2 minutes for another picture, and when I came back, the woman was still there and the man just sat down to read. I passed by, and very quickly, I made 4 photographs. This is what I kept.
~ Nicolas Levesque
Thanks to everyone who made comments and voted on the Battle of Beep and Bop (Samantha and my little Holga shoot-out). Anyone who followed the battle knows that I made a wee mistake with my Holga, Bop, which resulted in washed-out overexposed images. I thought for sure that Samantha would win the contest and I would be stuck on vacuum duties for a month. But alas and thankfully, once the votes were counted, the surprising result was a tie! It seems some people liked my ‘high key’ images, calling them ethereal and airy (and other arty terms I didn’t understand). I don’t care what they were called as long as I am not doing the Hoover Hose Dance for a month! There will be a rematch of the Beep and Bop and you’ll be invited to come along so stay tuned.
We wanted to give a small reward to those who took the time to comment on The Battle of Beep and Bop and the best comment earned a free eBook from us from the Visual Wilderness website. We like Brad Mangas’ comment:
I really want to vote for Sam because she wears cool hats, but in the short videos you two make I seem to hear Darwin talk more so for some reason I relate to him more thus his picture delivers a more personal feel to me. So I must go with my heart and vote for Brando. I would like to trade my free ebook for an all expense paid workshop please, thank you.
We also liked Kelly Morgan’s comment which is as arty as my overexposed photos.
I vote for Beep. I like the soft focus and color in the alley shot. In general, I like the effort that Bop gives. Bop seems to infuse Holga essence into these everyday scenes, while Beep seemingly records pencil sketches on cocktail napkins. It’s almost as if Bop, in its passive-aggressive manner, mocks Beep for even trying. And that is blatantly blurring the lines of friendly competition, and that is why I would like to see a photo from Bop of Darwin vacuuming with Beep around his neck.
We couldn’t decide who was more erudite, so we award both Brad and Kelly one of eBooks!
Some people might wonder why I didn’t just adjust the brightness of the overexposed film images in Photoshop to give a better result. For sure, some post manipulation of the scanned negative can give a better looking result. Below is one of my grossly overexposed negatives. Looks pretty ‘ethereal’ wouldn’t you say?
©Darwin Wiggett
With my Imacon film scanner and Photoshop I managed to squeeze all the information I possibly could from the negative and I got this result:
©Darwin Wiggett
The looks pretty good but there is a big price to pay for making a crappy negative and then trying to suck information out of it in a scan and that’s noise — check out the details of an enlarged section of the ‘fixed’ photo from above:
©Darwin Wiggett
With a properly exposed negative I might get film grain but no noise from the scanner – so unless I try to pass this off as a Georges Seurat pointillism masterpiece, it’s pretty crappy quality for a photo.
Just for fun, I took the same shot with the Canon G11. Thanks to the instant feedback of digital and the histogram display, I did not mess up the exposure!
©Darwin Wiggett
©Matthew Garsteck
This image is taken in Hollywood California. Why I thought this was a great image for the contest is because I wanted to step outside of the cliche/typical theme for travel photography. Sure I could have taken pictures of the Hollywood sign but I really wanted to capture the essence of what its like to enter a new city and you aren’t used to seeing such tall buildings. In fact it can be overwhelming in many ways, which is why I chose the composition and I did the edit the way I did (HDR).
I have always fantasized about being a ‘street photographer’; you know one of those people who wanders the streets of a city, camera in hand, mining amazing photos of people and scenes and intimate moments. But alas, I am simply not brave enough. I would rather meet a grizzly bear face-to-face in some high mountain pass than have to stalk the streets of the city drawing attention to myself and my camera. Heaven forbid if I actually had to talk with someone to get permission to take photos. That’s why I am a nature photographer, trees and rocks don’t say no. 😉
But I have just discovered a way to ease myself into street photography and come away with great moments just like Henri Cartier Bresson! Eli Reinholdtsen has just released a Craft and Vision ebook entitled Chasing Reflections that taught me that I can make great street images by indirectly photographing scenes and people by shooting reflections in windows, puddles, mirrors, metal and more. I was really inspired by Eli’s reflection images and by her approach. In fact, I may now be brave enough to try out a little street photography myself!. To whet your appetite for the technique and the results check out several of Eli’s images below.
Click here to buy Eli’s Chasing Reflections. (if you use the promotional code REFLECT4 when you checkout, you can have Chasing Reflections for only $4 OR use the code REFLECT20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST August 1, 2010).
©Eli Reinholdtsen
©Eli Reinholdtsen
©Eli Reinholdtsen
©Eli Reinholdtsen
©Craft and Vision
Photographer's Guide to the Canadian Rockies now available
Darwin Wiggett 