George

He was at Bond Street Underground station a couple of weeks ago, playing slide guitar. I recognised Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas theme as I came down the escalator. There must be a lot of ways to play it wrong but George played very well and I stopped to listen.

He’s a big personality and seen and done a lot of things and somehow in all that, coming through was this man that I liked.

I took his photograph, and didn’t look at the settings – a mistake I make too often. So the shots weren’t sharp.

So today he was there, just packing up. He asked me how I was getting on and I checked the settings on my camera and had another go.

When I looked at the photo after I took it, I could see he looked serious. And what else – maybe this, maybe that.

I remember a study by Kyoto University about six years ago that found that young people had a different ability to detect subtleties of expression compared to older people.

George wanted to see the photo and when I showed it to him in the LCD, he said he looked tired. I said we’d bump into one another again and I could show him how the photo looked on the page.

I can give him a print if he likes it on seeing it again.

Fuji X100F