I’ve mentioned before that although I am typically a Canon shooter I love my Panasonic GF1. I first learned about the camera from my friend James (who has posted here before.) Since that purchase almost all my photos on this site have been using this camera and it’s fixed focal lens.
Recently I was introduced to James’ friend Bradley, a passionate Leica shooter. The three of us swapped ideas and opinions on our respective cameras and decided it would be fun if we spent a day wandering a neighborhood together and shooting to sort of get three different perspectives on the area.
We met at noon right after James got off air from CHIRP radio and started walking right from the CHIRP offices in Ravenswood, an area most of us where not very familiar with.
For me this was a good opportunity to learn. Although I consider myself a very experience street shooter and technical photographer, I always love taking the opportunity to pick the brains of others. Walking with my two friends was something I found challenging at first as very often the three of us would wind up shooting the same thing and it was important to me to have some originality. However as I walked I noticed I was taking significantly less photos than the two of them. The question I then began to ask myself was why?
The problem with street photography over time is that there are only so many stop signs you can shoot before you bore your audience and yourself. I suspect that the reason my shooting was more conservative is that I’ve developed more of an eye for what interests me, and ultimately this means there is less I am attracted to, but the photos that come out as a result are stronger because I’m not wasting shots on things I don’t love.
Selectiveness is a discipline and a skill that is not to be taken lightly and one that it has taken me years to develop. In the age of digital cameras and nearly functionally unlimited storage I believe we’ve lost the selective process in the craft. In the days of film we would be limited to 24-36 exposures and that would be it, as a whole we were forced to be much more selective with our shots and it taught us to be better photographers, now we can throw away shots that are bad. I like to limit myself to a number of exposures as if we are limited to a single roll of film. This is something I will explore more in the future.
As we ventured through Ravenswood we found a good mix of parks, restaurants and industrial space. This diverse mix caught our eyes and intregued me. What follows are my photos from that day. All shot on my GF1. I will try and get Bradley and James to share their shots as well, I find them particularly interesting as we often shot very similar subjects with very similar cameras and wound up with very different results.