12 Frames (A day in the streets with Vivian Maier)

I’m currently reading two excellent books on street photographer Vivian Maier: Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows and Vivian Maier, Street Photographer, (both of which I recommend highly).

Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows is the longer book, at 288 pages, three hundred images, and a fair amount of biographical text.

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer has 123 pages and fewer photographs (and less text), but the book is larger in format and (to my mind) contains the better images.

Out of the Shadows reveals how Vivian would leave the Highland Park Chicago home where she was a nanny then, after leaving her charges at school, head downtown with her Rolleiflex medium-format camera loaded with one 12-frame roll.

One such expedition in 1963 begins with a shot of children at the school entrance, and ends eleven frames later in downtown Chicago. During this time Vivian takes a variety of pictures from many different vantage points.

Looking at the final tally, I’d say the roll yielded eight above-average images.

Although Vivian was constrained by the number of photos she was able to take, she nonetheless managed to make every frame count.

Contrast that with today. Shooting digitally, street photographers have no limitations. A typical photo walk of mine might yield around 150 images, only ten per cent or less of which could be keepers.

The lesson? I guess it might be to look more and shoot less ...

The big picture ...

Concentration

Quartet

Eye-catching ...

Stuck for time (little hand at five o' clock)

Subtext

Runners

Flare/Flair

Striking a pose...

Tom Gilzean

Narcissistic?

Serendipity and the Fuji X100s ...

To paraphrase Forrest Gump: ‘Street photography is like a box of chocolates; you never quite know what you’re gonna get.’

On most my photo walks, I reckon a good day might result in at least ten per cent keepers. (This is an average; sometimes I get a little less — sometimes more.)

On the odd occasion, however, I get one image (in this case, out of 150 frames) which is a little bit special.

Take the picture below entitled ‘Hat Trick.’ The image was one of several taken on a busy (and windy) corner of Princes Street in Edinburgh.

I had absolutely no idea what I had until I opened the image in Aperture and saw the man scrabbling for his hat (crouching next to the girl in the centre of the frame; the hat is on the pavement (sidewalk) left foreground).

Very serendipitous.

These are the first images I’ve taken with my new camera, a Fuji X100s. In an earlier post, I spoke of my experience with its predecessor, the X100. I didn’t like the X100 due to its hit-and-miss focussing and returned it.

The X100s, however, is a completely different unit. Battery life is still limited (I got around 120 shots before the first battery gave out), but isn’t a problem if you carry a couple of spares (good third-party batteries are obtainable cheaply on Amazon).

This isn’t a review, of course, as the attributes of the X100s are much more comprehensively covered elsewhere on the internet. The most winning feature of the camera for me, however, is image quality.

I shoot a lot in black and white, and the X100s produces great film-like images (in jpeg). This is important, as I don’t shoot RAW. I prefer to spend as little time as possible in post-process, and I think this is where Fuji excels.

So, a thumbs-up from me for the X100s (and for the Q-button, which enables effortless switching between colour and black and white modes).

The pictures below are all OOC jpegs with minimal sharpening:

Hat trick

'And now for a nice wee cuppa tea'

Anticipation

Art lover ...

Girl in a hurry

Long wait

Lost in thought ...

Pensive

Seasoned shoppers

Trews

Walk don't run ...