I used to carry my camera bag everywhere for a while. It’s a habit I should get into again. If nothing else it used to make me want to walk a lot, especially on days when the cloud patterns were interesting.
On the other hand, you do start to feel like that guy when you have a camera out all the time. People are also a lot more wary of cameras than they used to be. Case in point: the woman this week who pepper-sprayed a man taking pictures of children. His children, mind you.
I keep circling around to the problem of taking shots of people. I still feel shy about the idea of asking people to model for me, particularly considering how inexpert I feel about lighting (I also don’t have great lighting equipment). The main issue is that I think to shoot good portraits you have to really have a conversation with your subject about how they see themselves, how they’d like to see themselves, you have to have a feel for clothing and design and space. I still feel shy and ethically ambiguous about shooting people in public, despite some of my own photos of this kind being my favorite images.
But if there’s a time where it feels ok, I think it’s either when folks are in crowds at some public event or festival or when people’s individual faces aren’t visible, as in the case of this image. There’s something very human—in this case, gently romantic—about the silhouettes, but also nothing identifiable. This is one of my favorite accidental walking-about shots ever, despite the difficulty I faced in getting the building composition just right—this is a shot I recrop almost everything I look at it in Lightroom because I never feel it’s quite the right amount of building at the edges.