Most of what I’ve been reading in this forum, and the videos I have been watching, and the Webinars is all information on how to make the best possible image, suitable for display, and very likely printing. This means being very careful when taking the photo, and adjusting everything “just so” - optimizing all the PL4 settings for an awesome result.
Something I have been doing since the 1960’s is “candid photography”, trying to capture people just being themselves, at whatever they might have been doing. My 35mm film cameras were great for that, and I read up on how others did it, then tried on my own.
One thing about candid photography - it’s usually a fun thing to do, and while I took some dull, dreary shots, like in the New York City subways, I loved taking photos of people just enjoying themselves.
Nowadays, I find my DSLR cameras to be too big and too prominent to be able to get a candid photo, as people notice the camera and react to it, no longer just being themselves. My old 35mm film cameras were great for this. My Nikon F cameras, and the digital ones that replaced it were too noisy and too big. My Leica M cameras are fine, but I don’t always have them with me. My Fuji X100 cameras were good for this, but only if I was wearing one. In India I finally settled on a Canon G7X Pro Mk II as the perfect camera, because I could carry it on a small case that my belt went through. In India, it got to where I was always taking it with me, unless I wanted to take along something different.
Today was a fun day to try it out - my Leica batteries are charging, and I wanted to do something different. I walked down to the drawbridge I go to quite often, got in the middle and held the camera over the guardrail shooting some of the boats as they came by. For photos where people noticed me, those image are useless. What I wanted was people spontaneously having fun, as the boat was to sail under the drawbridge. (I remember being on boats going under bridges, and it felt like something special, and exciting!)
Ot of all the photos I took, I only got one that I liked, as the people were expressing themselves, oblivious to my being on the bridge with a camera. Maybe that’s because the camera was resting on the guardrail, not being held up to my eye. I’ll attach that photo here - processing it in PL4 was more fun than work. I had to crop it in PL4, as without holding the camera up to my eye, it was too difficult to capture the boat properly without cutting part of it off. My goal was to direct people’s eyes to the people on the boat.
(As always, anyone is free to mess around with this image, and maybe come up with a different way of processing it.)
(Most of what I’ve learned here was done - the histogram fills the whole box, there are no blown out areas, highlights or shadows, the white shows texture all over, and I added a little vignetting just for fun.)
IMG_0723 | 2021-01-23-G7X boats.cr2 (26.7 MB)
IMG_0723 | 2021-01-23-G7X boats.cr2.dop (11.6 KB)
