I have a personal definition of Street Photography. It is
personal because I don’t believe a formal definition of what is and what isn’t
Street Photography does anything except to fix firmly in the past our idea of
what street photography should be.
Personal definition
what is Street Photography:
- Urban environment
- Range of distances: from up close and personal to across the street. (Across the street being more urban life scene less traditional street.)
- The subject should scream life and humanity all those personal quirks and everyday little and big things that make us human
- The subject does not have to be a person or persons regardless it does have to evoke an image of humanity
- There has to be some transit nature to the subject. An example: A half eaten ice cream cone melting on a pavement evokes memories and tells a story
- Generally the single photograph should stand by it’s self even when it’s included in a larger photojournalist type story. Whether or not the single image shows truth in the photojournalist sense is not relevant.
My Personal
Definition of What Definitely Isn’t Street Photography (doesn’t mean I
won’t take the shot any way)
- Beach scenes; nature scenes, country roads; Architecture, statues and art as the primary subject.
- Static objects including empty streets (too obvious and trite) although fog street scenes are tempting
- Road traffic where the cars, trucks … are the subject even is it’s a long exposure and shows pretty light painting effects
- Too much staging although I hate getting into the street portrait debate
Maybe
- Sometimes a backside is just a backside and a snapshot is just a snapshot, trite is trite in whatever guise
- Geometric organizations and patterns, can be really interesting but if too clinical and clean without the grit it’s more of an abstract
- Sometimes a sign mixed with people work as street, it depends if the subject is the people rather then mostly the sign.
Most important: If you see a shot take the shot! If you take a shot then consider staying a minute or two and taking another the shot from several different positions and angles. Worry about any definitions of what is or is not street afterwards,
By my definition here are some borderline Street photographs. Except for the first one they all came from the same roll of film. Remember there is no right or wrong answer.
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| Robocall: “Democracy Can Kiss My Shiny Metal Ass" |
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| Body Language |
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| Freshly Squeezed |
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| At The Bay |
Well priced alternative to a flatbed scanner.7200 dpi scanner (when measured with a target it turns out to be 3800 dpi in both directions which is right in Nikon cool scan territory)
Actual Dmax > 3.6 and can be increased through multiple exposure mode.
The Negative:
Scanning is done through the included Silverfast Se plus software.
Manual feeder so after you load the carrier you have to push it through by hand one frame at a time. This is not really a problem as I hand correct every negative
No digital ICE (not really a problem for me as I don't use it anyway and it doesn't work on B&W)
My Findings:
If you have any form of workflow the Silverfast software is a piece of junk you would have to spend at least the cost of a scanner to upgrade to a usable version. Besides a rather useless raw mode it doesn't have 48 bit per colour save function. The raw mode would be good if it integrated with lets say Lightroom but it doesn't. It's designed to work with another pricey piece of software you have to buy from them. I don't know about you but I only like to scan once and use the file as a master.
To top it off they keep on telling you to read a 500 page manual and strongly implying that if you want to be a pro you are using the wrong scanner software.
The solution is easy buy reasonably priced Vuescan software. The pro has lifetime support, useful raw workflow and can support multiple scanner types.
Scanning B&W I used some nice grainy HP5+ and found out this:
Multi-exposure is effectively a two pass scan with each scan taken at a different exposure, the 2 passes are then blended together. This actually works and extends the dmax and dynamic range for difficult frames. There is a slight but noticeable lose of resolution. most of which can be recovered with some of the hated USM filtering. Not much need for this function with HP5 I will have to wait until I test it on some high dynamic range shot using TMAX film.
The raw scans pre-adjusted with a film profile seem to contain all the tone information with no banding or noise. Thus they can act as masters.
For 3600dpi scans there was marginally better detail and micro-contrast when scanning at 7200dpi at letting Vuescan reduce the output to 3600dpi (down sampling). This seems to be real not some USM shapening slight of hand (USM was off). Makes sense as the measured on a target dpi is 3800dpi and downsizing by 2 is equivalent to multiple sampling without the alignment problems.
As scan time is almost 4 times as long at 7200dpi I will use 3600dpi scans on images that I don't care so much about and 7200dpi down sampled to 3600dpi on images that look interesting.
Also of slight interest was that letting the software convert from the colour scan to BW gave slightly better micro-contrast then converting the 48bit colour to 16 bit B&W after the fact or scanning in 16bit B&W.
I tested the same negative on my Epson V500. The Epson had less then half the actual resolution and more compression in the grey scale. The hp5 film grains were blobs instead of salt and pepper with the Plustek.