About five ponies 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 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.
This is a man in a gallery in New York. I was so taken with his face and hat that I was determined to get a photo. In that moment I didn’t care who saw what or who said what: I wanted that photo.
I did a similar thing in a gallery in London and a woman who worked at the gallery came striding over and ordered me to put down my camera. I did, but not before finishing taking the photo I was after. It’s a funny business, but the act of taking a photo can be quite exhilarating.
