Posted on 10/01/2012 5:20:22 PM PDT by Revolting cat!
I take a lot of photographs. So many, that my Sony DSLR broke, probably from abuse of my use, the LCD screen in the OVF mode won’t display, though everything else works OK, and two distant repair outfits sent me estimates of $200 and $235 plus shipping, while Sony says send it in, we’ll tell ya. (Ever hear any more of local repair shops for anything?) Repair or replace?
Anyway, walking downtown this afternoon I saw a familiar figure a tenor saxophone player, a very good one, who plays at some or other spot downtown all the time, really, I think, practicing his be bop licks, because he won’t ever play a recognizable tune. Today he stood at a photogenic corner and I decided to pull my Sony out of the backpack and wait for an interesting scene with him on the extreme left side of the frame. I waited 10 minutes or so before something started happening, and when it did I raised my camera. I stood leaning against the wall 25 or more feet from him when he stopped playing, turned and started screaming at me. SCREAMING!
I didn’t press the shutter, though I probably should have - here was my scene - and I approached him. It was a well rehearsed speech which he must have made before. It is dehumanizing, like taking pictures of animals in the ZOO; if I were to take a picture of a friend I would ask him, wouldn’t I, he continued before I could say anything. Dehumanizing, he repeated.
He was right, I thought, I should have asked, but he also seemed to me an angry man. Four, five earrings in each ear, 6 foot 5, powerful lungs for sure. I told him I didn’t take a picture, he continued yelling, I said that he too was invading people’s space with his sounds. He cursed me (“eff you!”), called me names, though none any more original than the names that the true believers, and “principaled” voters call us on this forum, and as I walked away he kept cursing, naming names, before he returned to his playing which did not appear affected by the encounter. A true professional!
I don’t take photographs of people usually, unless they are silhouettes in the distance or appear faceless, as it were, but when I do, I treat them as photographic objects, just like I treat everything else, shapes, surfaces, light and shadow, stick figures. Earlier I left portraiture to Richard Avedon, now that he’s dead I leave it to Annie Leibovitz. That's my style, OK? In this particular shot I might have cropped it so that only the man’s hands and the saxophone were visible in the frame, just as yesterday I took a photo of dry leaves on a supermarket parking lot, stripes of light and shadow from a nearby fence on them, and in the corner a wheel and part of the frame of a shopping cart, enough to tell you it’s a shopping cart, you don’t need more. Several friends liked it on Facebook.
Should I have told him this? L'esprit d'escalier.
As I walked away somewhat shook up toward my espresso cafe where I order black tea, the second part of the title above came into my mind. I have seen street musicians all over the world being photographed by scores of tourists and none reacting like this guy, if ever reacting at all. Dehumanizing? And such outbursts are what?
Now ya know why he is busking....
Instead of playing a steady gig for real money!
Just sayin'
Pack heat if you do, though.
do not send it to sony! sent my 300.00 camera to sony to fix battery door while still under warranty. they sent me an e-mail saying they would fix it for 750.00 said it got wet.
i took pictures with it on the way to ship it. never worked again.
do not send it to sony! sent my 300.00 camera to sony to fix battery door while still under warranty. they sent me an e-mail saying they would fix it for 750.00 said it got wet.
i took pictures with it on the way to ship it. never worked again.
Thanks, I’ll send it to the other guys with whom I have had previous good experience.
I learned early on not to bother with people shots, they either do some stupid looking pose or get insulted as your guy did. I stick to God’s creation and wildlife, with occasional architectural subjects. Less drama that way.
That said, I always ask permission before taking any stranger's photo. If they say no, I don't take the shot.
As for your Sony DSLR: which model and how old?
Keep taking pictures, but avoid the saxaphone player. He could be schizophrenic. He sounds dangerous.
OTOH you sound like you have a terrific sense of composition.
Alpha A300 2 1/2 years old. Motherboard needs repair, apparently.
I suspect the guy must have some evening gig somewhere, perhaps on weekends.
Interesting, I didn’t consider his mental and medical state. You could be right. Meds and off his meds.
I didn’t mention but I had never seen anybody drop money in his cup, and I’d seen him many times. Free form jazz ain’t Country Roads take me home, that’s for sure.
But if you asked him for a photo, you would have lost all the spontaneity and reality of the scene.
Although the man sounds a bit psychotic, a simple compliment would have sufficed after taking the photo - “your playing was fantastic, and I wanted to have a photo to remember you with...”
I’ve done better with things and animals with stock video and the odd still sale.
I’ve upgraded to a 60D since Ritz was going out of business and they had a great buy. I could have gotten a T3 or 4 new somewhere else for a little more than I paid for the 60.
When it comes to recruiting model “talent” in my part of the world, all I have ever gotten for the most part was responses from the freak shows, the lazy, the stupid, etc. Modelmayhem and OneModelPlace aren’t much better. I offer paying cash gigs too for easy G maybe PG stuff for stock.
Out of the handful that I ever dealt with, there were two really good, sharp, and professional. One may have moved back to the UK and the other works I don’t know how mnay jobs and stays booked. Synching schedules with her is the hard part.
The only real people thing I do are 2K/5K/Whatever K races my wife runs for something to do. I am no runner. Those help me stay in practice when the once in a while paying race event comes along.
Exactly. It reminds of when I last visited my mother when she was still alive (well, couldn’t visit her when she was dead, could I? Actually, I have visited her grave.) We went on some excursion with her, my sister and sister’s husband. I wanted to take some spontaneous pictures, and as I had done since I was 14 and in summer camps I would without giving a clue rush a few steps ahead of a group walking, turn around suddenly and snap a pic. With my schoolmates back when I got whole bunch of nice photographs. With my family, as soon as I turned around, they all froze, smiled and posed.
Then, later at my sister’s house, she pulled out albums of photographs and set them down on my knees. Photograph after photograph from years gone by of them three or sometimes two, or four with a cousin or somebody, in locations all over the place, around the country, the same, always the same, the surroundings mostly unseen somewhere in the background, and only these people smiling and posing, album after album just like they did in my photo.
But you know what, what seeing those snapshots did, and made me finally realize why people take such boring snapshots, is that it provoked their memories of those times and places. “Oh, here’s where you lost your shoe”, “Oh that’s where we met that priest, remember?”, etc, etc. Who’s to say such uses of photography are inferior or illegitimate?
Hmm. Given that a quick look at Amazon and eBay turns up quite a few A300 bodies in the $250-$300 range, you might be money ahead buying one of those — or upgrading to a newer model, if you’re made out of money — and continuing to use this one until it fails completely.
Yeah, thanks. I already have replaced a failed 18-70 lens instead of repairing it. I’ve been thinking of upgrading to A65.
I am no photographer, I just like to take pictures. I shoot with a point and shoot camera and like to get nature shots, though I have done a few people shots from a distance. I caught one with a small boy about 3yo, standing next to his dad, looking up at dad with love in his eyes as they stood there with fishing rods on the bank of the lake. Dad never saw the look, I don't think. It was a great people shot opportunity. A real photographer like Swampsniper could have had a winning photo with that shot.
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