My Kitbag

Ah, yes—the cameras, and lenses, and other bits and parts we use to capture images. Our kit. I have a simple point of view towards photography equipment: if I can work without it, I don't buy it, carry it, or use it. But our kits are the tools we use as photographers, so I've always bought the best stuff I could afford. It's hard to do a first-rate job with second-rate tools. 

In the past, I've owned Nikons, Leicas, Hassieblads, Rollies, Bronica's, Mamiyas, a Linhof 4 by 5, and a Deardorff 8 by10. The Deardorff I owned for about a week and used it only once. Then I sold it. Someone made me an offer I could not refuse. These days, I use only smaller, lighter mirrorless Sonys. It would be nice to have larger files to work with, but my Sonys produce images that are fine for what I shoot now: editorial stock.

I've owned primes, zooms, wide angles, ultra-wide angles, telephotos, teleconverters, perspective-control lenses, and almost everything else. Strobes with umbrellas and portable flash units with bouncers and defusers and confusers? Yup. 

A friend asked me what focal length lens I use most. That would be 24mm. With the pocket Sony RX100 series, I might crop a frame sometimes, and I usually make use of the perspective control tool in Adobe Lightroom.  

Camera supports? Of course. I have a Silk Pro 804 carbon-fiber tripod with me, and two ball socket heads, a Bogen, and a Leitz. It's a little on the short side, but it's useful. Gone now are my larger tripods, table pods, and clip pods. An extra I did buy was the UPstrap-Pro. Those straps are much more secure than the strap that comes with your camera. I still have an UPstrap on my Domke shoulder bag.

When I set out on this endless journey two years ago, I could not find the bottom folding half of my wonderful Leitz tablepod, damn it!

But enough about me and my stuff . . .

Here's what's been happening this past week with the ongoing gradual opening up of the Liverpool lockdown:

There were a billion and a half people walking around Liverpool City Centre yesterday. Some wore facemasks. Others did not. On the street, I steer clear of people but have my facemask on my chin at the ready. I pull it up to cover my mouth and nose when I go into shops. I do not go out late at night and rub shoulders with party-minded rugby-type beer drinkers. 

At my advanced age, if I get the virus it will probably kill me. But at my advanced age, something is going to kill me. I have no plan to live forever.  

I don't have a dog or a cat or any furry creature that I can scratch behind the ears. I've sort of adopted this young herring gull as my pet. It hangs out on the marque of my building looking lost and confused. Like all the birds in Liverpool, it's hungry. I talk to it and try to encourage it to fly out over the Irish Sea and catch a fish. But this gull is not smart and it doesn't seem to understand me. Maybe it's my New York accent? Someone told me it's against the law to feed the gulls. I plan to feed this bird anyway. 

Gulls are often thought of as flying rats. But in fact, they are an endangered species. I'm trying to work out what's the best thing to do. I know I can't save all the gulls; I'm just focused on this one bird, what it can eat, and what it should not.

Editorial Stock

Editorial stock photography is a retirement game that I play in my senior years. I don't do it for the money, although I welcome any money I earn for doing it. It's what I do instead of playing golf or tennis or watching daytime television. 

I work with a combination of three sets of rules—those of the marketplace, those of Alamy, my stock photo agency, and my own. Mostly, I stick to these rules. But rules are meant to be bent and sometimes broken. 

I'm a city boy. I don't have a car or a driving permit anymore, so I can't do landscapes. I don't do flowers or wildlife either. I see only pigeons and gulls and some other smaller birds where I am now. When I lived in Oxfordshire, I would sometimes see hedgehogs. There is something lovable about those little creatures. I had a family of them living in my badly tendered garden in Woodstock. There were voles, too. But I don't see these small mammals here in the center of Liverpool.  

I don't like to capture pictures of beggars or homeless people, although I sometimes do. It was impossible for me to resist snapping this man from Senegal with his dramatic posture. More often than not, I want my stock photos to have an upbeat, positive message. It's the message that makes it stock. If you can write a caption to an image, positive or negative, it's stock.

Instead of begging, this senior Chinese woman in Lower Manhattan collected cans for recycling. She was focused and hardworking with courage and a positive attitude. I used to say hello to her in Mandarin, and after a while, she gave me a little smile and a nod. I hope she's been okay in the lockdown. 

There are a lot of unexciting subjects that work well for editorial stock: signs, marquees, storefronts, statues, products, and people doing most anything. 

And then there are landmarks, of course. Landmarks can be tricky. Everybody snaps away at landmarks. Alamy has 125,039 images of the Manhattan Skyline, 71,792 of Big Ben. 

I do okay with stock sales of landmarks, with one frustrating, inexplicable exception: St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. I have what I consider some really good images of this most famous church on Earth, yet I've never had a sale or even a zoom. (A zoom is a closer look by a potential buyer.) 

It seems that I've repeated some things I've said in earlier blogs. I'm sorry about that.

Social Distancing

Last week I said that I'd begun to eat out again. Have you? Or are you worried about social distancing? 

I'm pretty good at guessing a person's height. I'm rarely off by more than a half-inch. So I think it's odd that I'm having trouble estimating the prescribed social distancing space of 2 meters. I know that that is roughly six and a half feet. The supermarkets and other businesses have distances marked out on the floor. But are they the same? Are they consistent? I don't think so. (Of course, I'm an American, and Americans don't use or understand the metric system.)

And what about the layouts for tables in restaurants? To me, they look like their closer together than 2 meters, both indoors and out. Here's a shot I took of Gino D'Acampo on Castle Street a few days ago. 

Two meters? One and a half? What do you think? 

I had my second mushroom pizza of the month at Rudy's next door to Gino's yesterday. There was lots of room where I sat inside in the cool. Scousers and tourists alike were sitting outside in the bright sunshine. Italians wouldn't be caught dead eating a meal in the sunshine. And neither would I. 

These two mountain village Italians seem to understand the concept of social distancing.

And let's not forget that in 1918 we were visited by another pandemic.

Recipe for Food Pics

Food is a large part of the common-access, editorial subjects I capture for Alamy. I estimate that a quarter to a third of my stock photo library deals with food. That includes people dining out, farmers' markets, items on supermarket shelves, and closeups of meals. Editorial stock photography is the only shooting I do now that I'm semi-retired. 

With the lifting of the Lockdown here in Liverpool, I've started eating out again. In this past month, I've had lunch out once or twice a week. Recently, there's a 50% government discount on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays which makes things almost affordable. 

A Pizzeria in Lower Manhattan

I have a friend who is a leading assignment photographer in America. She does wonderful studio shoots that often involve a chef, a stylist, and a few assistants. It's beautiful work. Me? Well, I don't do that. 

Instead, I aim at that place somewhere between studio-controlled images and casual snapshots. The meals I'm photographing are the meals I'm about to eat, and I'm usually hungry. I'm not shooting coherent sets of pictures or full restaurant menus. Each image I upload must stand on its own. 

Caprese Salad

I work fast, getting three classic frames: overhead, diner's view, and a closeup. Mostly, I use the light from one window. I don't ponder shots or look for "creative" angles. The props, the extras, are always utensils, napkins, and other things found in all dining areas. Food, I feel, is about taste. If an image tweaks your tastebuds, it's successful. If it doesn't, it's not. Simple, eh? 

At home, in summer, I like to fix myself a large plate of mixed, multi-cultural antipasto—some Italian, some Mexican, and a little Greek, Indian, or Middle Eastern. Tasty and healthy food. But for stock photography, simpler subjects work better. 

Green Beans on a Green Table

And famous, popular dishes seem to work best.  

A Cheeseburger and Fries

Street

That's "street" as in street photography, meaning candid images that illustrate the natural environment with an emphasis on meaningful activities. Mostly that's people doing things, but Elliot Erwitt did five books on dogs doing things that would certainly qualify as "street." 

These days, I do a fair amount of street shooting myself, but the emphasis is on editorial stock (street for stock). An image is editorial stock if it suggests a caption to me. I want to shoot more street, more unplanned people pictures, but trying to find people doing

Henri Cartier-Bresson pioneered the genre of street photography. He viewed his art as capturing the decisive moment. He used small 35mm Leica cameras. The new phone cameras and pocketable digital mirrorless cameras have given street photography a new lease on life. Is everybody a photographer now? No, just 94.6% of us.

Soon after HCB came Walker Evens, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Vivian Maier, and others. The full list, even just my favorites, is much longer. It does not include Magnum's, Bruce Gilden. Bruce is at the top of two of my other lists: Obnoxious People and Total Assholes. Magnum has seen better days.

Do you think Boris reads my blog? He did backtrack on his "normal by Christmas" statement after I made fun of it last week. So maybe . . . maybe. . . . Nah.