Street Shots 1-2-3: Two

This week, I'd like to share with you some personal experience in taking street shots. This is the second post.

(News Report: Stopping at the traffic night, the ladies were overheard exchanging news about the kids and comparing notes on their perfomance at school. On several earlier occasions, I had found the possible novel angel of taking pictures from my waist level of passers-by holding an umbrella. I hadn't managed to take any until this one. Since there were actually three ladies gossiping and the sidewalk was extremely narrow, I could easily catch their attention even if I paused for half a second to shot. So I opened the aperture wide for a fast shutter to compensate my quick steps going past them. The blind composition was made possible by luck, anticipation and lots of practices)

Yesterday we stopped at the setting I used for the street shots of human conditions. I promised to dig deeper into each component of the setting. To recap the setting: focus fixed at just over 1 metre; manual metering; focal length at 28mm; ISO at 200.

Fixed Focus

When I walk on and take the shots without really stopping, the fixed focus stands me in good stead because the auto focusing will lag behind my walking pace and lose its grip on the subject. The approximation of the one-metre distance suits most of the circumstances for this kind of street shots from my experience. A subject beyond the one-metre distance is not preferable for such street shots of human conditions because of two problems which I wrote yesterday.

In case the subject is closer or farther, several presses of the arrow buttons on the GX200 with my thumb can compensate for the focusing distance. Otherwise, the smart implementation of the Function Buttons on the GX200 gives me the last resort of assigning the Fn1 to one-press toggling between Manual Focusing and Auto Focusing.

Check out your compact if you can store the toggling between the two focusing mode in any similar quick button.

(Headful: This carrying style is very Balinese, save the lack of a cushioning bandana to steady the box. I followed him for a few steps and, after composing the image right, press the shutter)

Manual Metering

Obviously, the lighting situation and the atmosphere vary in different scenes. I need to expose the scene to my taste. Thanks to the great control on the GX200, doing manual metering and the subsquent tweakings are blissfully intuitive which requires only my right thumb. I am sure that the manual metering in at least the LX3 is too clusmsy for this kind of shoting condition.

(Stout Lady and Curious Baby: The lady is checking out the ad posts outside the real property agencies. She is probably looking for an apartment to rent. I hesitated about the scene at first but, with my photographer's mind at play, finally turned back to it just in time to take the photo before the lady left. When taking this photo, I stood back from the sidewalk into a road and composed the image)

On probably all occasions when taking such street shots, I metered a similar scene before I came up to the real scene to take the shot. This is for two things: first, I have to check out if the shutter speed is adequate. For my normal walking pace and a moving subject, a shutter speed not below 1/300s is sufficient for a clear subject. If the subject is stationary and I can pause my step slightly at the press of the shutter, a shutter speed around 1/100s suffices. Since the GX200 restricts the shutter speed to a certain range under different aperture values, this advanced checking also allows me to stop down the aperture in case the fastest shutter speed is still to much for a very bright scene.

Second, the pre-metering lets me know if a lower or higher ISO should be used to compensate the exposure combo so that the subject can be freezed or blurred to my taste. If you’re a tyro, this is how it works: if the shutter speed is too slow and the image will turn out shaky, I will have to use a higher ISO to make a clear shot. If I hope the background with moving people to be a bit blurry, I may use a safe, slower shutter speed and pan the camera along the subject’s movement; otherwise, if the scene is too bright and the faster exposure combo is not slow enough, I have to switch the camera to the slowest ISO and figure out the best possible exposure combo.

(Going Up, Going Down: The passer-by with the backpack is climbing up the stairs to the university campus, while the cleansing worker is walking down the sidewalk to perform duties. I was enticed by the lines and aware of the interest they would give to a photo. So sitting on the upper deck of the bus, I shot the picture before the bus swooshed off. If not for the confined space of the window and the pressing movement, I would have included the big uni's emblem on the right to tell the theme more clearly)

What's more, GX200 features a second Function Button Fn2 where I stored the Auto Exposure Lock function. A thumb press on it can lock the pre-metering result. See if you can store a similar AEL function in a quick button.

Come back tomrrow for the parts on the focal length and ISO.