When Shooting Wide Open in Street Photography Is Just Plain Fucking Stupid
I’ve coined a term for stopping up to your maximum aperture on the lens and walking around in Aperture Priority mode on Auto ISO: Goofy Mode. It’s what everyone is bound to do when they purchase a fast prime lens (like a Sony 85mm 1.8.) and set out and about and put it through the paces. They dial in for the most kick-ass, background-blurring, bokeh-delicious settings and take no prisoners. For the next week or two, the settings seldom change. The bokeh is exploited like child labor. Every subject looks like a rockstar, popping out from the background like a NatGeo magazine cover. And it’s a natural reaction, right? After spending hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars on a superstar lens, one wants to take it out to the racetracks and do their Indy 500 time trials and try to smash the 0 to 60 record. It’s all well and good.
Until it’s not.
At some point, the photographer has got to put the bokeh crack pipe down and breathe. And think. “Okay, it’s enough of that. It’s time to do photography again. The high has worn off and it’s time to get serious.” It’s a natural phase, maybe even a ritual that one must endure after the purchase of a new lens that can blur out the universe. And when it’s time to start shooting again, it’s time to get the settings right for your subjects. Or else you’ll end up with a potentially good image that falls short of its potential because you decided to fuck about in Goofy Mode. Like I did with this image.
What’s wrong with this picture? Apart from the framing, which missed the mark for me because I’m too close to the subject and I’m cutting the head off of a very important supporting actor in the background? This part of my story is only a precautionary about using extreme focal lengths in street photography: it’s more difficult to shoot spontaneous, candid street portraits with an 85mm prime.
Of equal importance is the aperture setting, which for this image, was f1.8. The ISO was 100 and the shutter speed was, get ready for this, 1/750 of a second. Safe to say that I captured the subject without any motion blur or camera shake to muddle the image. But what I missed entirely was the blind man in the background. He should have been more in focus because he’s very important to the scene. And I treated him like a second-rate passerby on the street.
Had I framed this scene properly, Goofy Mode would have ruined the shot. Unless I had multiple pictures to justify doing something more creative, which I do not have because this was candid, then I wasted an opportunity to capture a flawless street portrait. Ideally, I would have dialed in f5.6 or f8 for this one because I had excess shutter speed to lend to the cause. And the man would have been more prominent in the narrative.
For images like this, excessive bokeh tends to remove the relationship between our main subject and any background characters. For this specific shot, I would have preferred that my audience understood right from the start that these two individuals shared a relationship of some kind, father-daughter, uncle-daughter, or otherwise. Because when I have to explain that the man in the background is blind and the girl is his attendant, then I’ve fucked up the photo. In this case, with bad framing and from shooting in Goofy Mode.
The lesson for me was that I had to be more mindful of my environment and the reasons for my settings. Photographers must be intentional. Anything else is just goofing around.
