Street

Of course, it is the opportunity to photograph someone absorbed in what he is doing that gives me the desire to photograph. But the colours – the green of the gate, the blue of the jeans, the blue-green of the shop, and even the top and jeans of the woman walking towards me – helped bring it together. The name-board above the shop and the top and bottom bards of the gate lead away to the left, out of the shot. The man is leaning into that and that helps put dynamism into the shot because the sloping angles are set against the square verticals and horizontals.

Ricoh GR III at 400 ISO at f/ 2.8 and 1/125 second.

About five pony and trap vehicles were riding through the centre of Cambridge. I just happened upon them as they came up the street and I held the camera at waist height and judged where it was pointing – and it worked out OK. Ricoh GRIII, and the metadata tells me I shot at f1 45 at 1/2000 second and ISO 250.

I guess the boy at the front is videoing the trip.

For anyone who knows Cambridge, this is on the street just outside the Senate House, and you can just see the archway to Gonville and Caius College in the background. The market Square is just to the right of the frame down the street by the side of the Cambridge University Bookshop.

I was just watching a YouTube video by Stephen Leslie in which he says that fateful sentence. I guess it is true, and even a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit can be forensically examined for life in former times. So then I was looking at some of my own photos, and came across this that I took on the 27th January this year (with an X-E3 with 27mm f2.8 lens). I took it because of some consonance between the colours of the clothing of the man and the woman. And also simply because it was colourful. And because of the way the two of them are standing.

And who knew that just this eleven months later that masks would be gone for the most part, and that the masks here would become a social document.

Ah, the spectacles of the woman standing were so interesting. And the hair and the denim jacket. And the closeness of the relationship of the three of them. They talked without polite niceties, like families do. At least like close families who can actually talk to one another do. And they were French, so a whole different approach to life.

I was in Tate Britain, and I saw the man trailing his raincoat, looking at the Constable painting that’s in the second photo here. He moved on and I didn’t get the shot, but then I saw him walking past a painting of ships, and that did nicely.

The two people sitting in Tate Britain and looking at John Constable’s painting Salisbury Cathedral were interesting. She was an American cow-girl by her dress. I took a photo of her with my phone when she was standing, struck by the harmony of colour between what she was wearing and the painting.