The Keepers: July 16, 2022
This past weekend I went out to get some shots and to test out a faster shutter speed for using ICM. I’d been using a default of 1/4 of a second for most of my shots, sometimes slowing it down even more up to a second or more. But never any faster. I’d read on someone’s website that she had been using 1/10 and other speeds that I thought weren’t really compatible with intentional camera movement. Why not give it a go?
I managed to get four edited images out of the 200 or so shots I took on Saturday. That’s a pretty good haul. I’ll include them here with the original captions that I used on my Instagram feed.
Once in a while, I'll bother with a name for a piece to initiate a conversation about a concept, or at least, that's my intention, however lofty. But it's funny how a word can drastically change the interpretation of a piece and even serve to destroy it. This is why I typically stay away from naming pieces unless the name truly serves my purpose.
That being said, I love to toy with the idea that the most obvious interpretation of a named piece is "the correct one." In this case, someone may think the worst...maybe the woman was discarded by whoever is driving the car? Maybe she was a prostitute and just dumped along the road? Something along those lines. This is too obvious. But there's another problem with this, at least as it pertains directly to me.
Sometimes I'm asked about the moral and ethical concerns when it comes to shooting street photography. It's a big topic in the street photography community and there are varying opinions on a great many real-life experiences and hypothetical situations. My general response, which isn't as divisive as someone like Bruce Gilden, who once stated, "I have no ethics." Maybe it's because to state such a thing is to actually admit to having an ethical code of sorts, even if it's not to everyone's liking. I do have ethics. But I like to say that they're nobody's business but my own. I'll photograph where it's permitted to do so by law, which is much of India, Europe, and North America (all the places I've done street photography), with few exceptions. Even in Germany, especially Berlin -- a magical place for street photography -- it's technically illegal to photograph people without their permission; but everyone does it anyway. And so do I.
A friend broached the subject recently and said that I must be relieved to be shooting ICM now that my subjects are mostly unrecognizable. I told him, much to his surprise, that nothing has really changed. People don't know that I'm shooting ICM, if they even know what that entails. The same sort of suspicion in the West would probably be raised under certain situations. But for the most part, I'm enjoying the kind of false celebrity as a foreigner that allows me to photograph freely almost everywhere I go in India. I've enough experience that most of my subjects don't even know that I'm photographing them, including the woman featured in this piece. I once asked an Indian photographer friend of mine why people in India were so open or passive about having their pictures taken. He said, "They probably have bigger problems than a photographer bugging them for a few moments." So true. And the other side of the coin is that there are so many who love to have their pictures taken. It makes the prospect of shooting street photography in India joyful, to say the least.
No caption.
What I love about street photography in Mumbai (and India in general) is that there are scenes worthy of photographing literally anywhere. Maybe a lot of this has to do with the fact that I'm an outsider always looking in although I have been doing this just shy of a decade in this country. I'm thrilled to have found a new way of presenting my street scenes via a fine art approach.
I recently tweaked my ICM shooting to reflect the speed necessary to capture a lot of the things I'm used to doing with speeds of 1/500 of a second or more. My 1/4 second speed just wasn't cutting it: literally, the world can completely change in a blink of an eye and I needed a shutter speed to keep up with what I was seeing and wanting to capture. My recent outing has confirmed for me that adjusting to a 1/10 of a second as a default walk-around mode is proving to be effective in capturing peek-a-boo moments while providing motion for my artistic ocean.
