Bangkok est une ville pleine d’impasses. Vous rentrez dans une rue qui a l’air calme dans l’espoir de rejoindre un autre grand axe, ou même un quartier intéressant, et vous vous retrouvez simplement dans un cul de sac.
Ces impasses sont faciles à reconnaitre, les scooters ne s’y engagent pas (ou très peu).
Cette galerie regroupe une sélection de mes meilleurs images lors de mon séjour en Chine en 2008.
Cette galerie de photographies provient d’une sélection d’images faite à Nankin et Yang Chua en Chine en 2009. Elles ont été faites des Pentax K7, K10 et K20 et un Nikon D700.
Ces photos ont été faites entre 2003 et 2007, principalement à Singapour, quelques fois en Chine. On y trouve des images digitales faites au D70 et au S3Pro et films faites au Voigtlander Bessa R2.
Ces machines vendent des tickets pour des bus.
Ce fruit à pointes s’appelle le durian. En Malaisie ou à Singapour, il pue la pisse de chat, mais en Thaïlande, surement à cause du climat plus modéré, son odeur est moins caractéristique.
D’un abord difficile, le durian est un fruit assez délicieux dès lors qu’on y a goûté, mais malheureusement aussi coûteux que goûteux.
Street is a theatre where happens the life of a city. People come and go, kids play, here takes place the history of a people. By those small details, the photographer has the duty to record nothing less than history.
Have you ever watched the street photographs of Cartier Bresson ?
Cartier Bresson did not do more than just recording with his camera the day to day life of passing people in various situations. They were interesting at that time because Henry Cartier Bresson is a great photographer at any time, but they are even more today because they show a time who has disappeared already.
The time of today is the time of today, it will eventually disappear all the same. Because rules and laws change, because tradition is lost and new habits come to replace old habits. Images of the city change day by day.
The street photographer has the duty to record images of this theatre at this very moment.
A priest is giving a blessing inside a house. Bangkok 2023.
If the art of photography follow rules, the art of street photography has none but the daring of each street photographer. What I share here is only my view, my way of doing things, most of those rules should apply in most cases, but some people are more daring than others.
To make street photographs, I run the street. I walk more than ten kilometers every week end in the streets of wherever I live at the time and I shoot, I shoot again and I still shoot until I can not shoot anymore. To force me to shoot more, I use the guilt feeling of purchasing expensive photographic gears, I would not feel good not using them, so I go out and use them to take shots of whatever surrounds me.
A woman is cleaning some dishes in the street, Nanjing, China 2010.
I improve my technical knowledge. Whatever my camera does automatically for me, I must be able to do it myself. Preferably, I work in manual mode, make my own focus, use a hand cell to define the shutter speed and the aperture. This knowledge will give me the mean to alter the photograph at the time of taking the shot, not trying to get things good during the post processing.
Street cooks, Bangkok, Thailand 2023.
I mostly shot people in action. A theatre means that there is an action, it happens that the action is performed by animals or vehicle, but most of the time, action is performed by people. So I take photographs of people while they are doing things, trying to not be seen myself (otherwise, it would change the way they perform their action).
I prefer wide angle lenses. Believe it or not, I have less chances to be seen taking photographs of people when I’m close to them using a wide angle than when I’m far and using a tele-lens. Ma favorite lens is the 21mm, but I’ve worked with some 12mm in the past.
Nanjing, China, 2010. Nikon D700 with the 15mm Nikkor.
When people see me, I smile, I great them, say “hello”, re-assure them on my intention. Most of the time, it happens good, people just want to ensure I mean them no harm, but it happened in the past that I face people unhappy to be in the photograph, even become aggressive, I usually leave the place.
I never shot inside private property without prior autorisation. Living in Thailand, where the border between private property and public place can be quite blur at some time, I miss many shots because of this rule. But that’s a point that I would not like anybody to be invasive in my home, so I’m not invasive in their home.
Nanjing, China 2008
I learnt that I must never shot official and governmental facilities, ports, airports, train stations and especially military facilities (that can lead to a whole lot of problems). However, most of the time, there is no issue to photograph police in action (it may depend on the country). I’m not a reporter, so I prefer to stick with street photographs.
Rubik cube competition, Bangkok 2023
I use every opportunity and join events when I can. During events, I don’t hide myself to make photographs, on the contrary, I’m invasive. It’s a place where people will even perform better in front of the camera, it gives them more importance.
I travel light, in fact it depends. When I’m walking in a city where I live, I know I’ve time for myself. So I take one camera and one lens and I do my day with that. When I cover an event or when I travel, I usually work with two cameras and three lenses. As my lenses are M mount (whatever the camera I use), they’re quite small and light. I never bring my whole set when going out, it’s too heavy and it does not make sense, I’ll never use all this stuff in just one day.
Aperture, speed and sensitivity are the tree parameters that we have to decide when it come to get a correct exposition of your photographs.
Aperture refers to the quantity of light that your lens will get trough. The maximum aperture = length of the lens at infinite focus / width of the frontal glass. So a 50mm with a frontal glass of 25mm has a max aperture of 2. Inside the lens, there is diaphragm that you can close to change this value. Each value of the scale is the previous value times the square root of 2 and it divides by 2 the quantity of light.
So for a 100mm F2.8, the next step is 2.8 * sqrt(2) = 4. Set at f4, half the light go through.
The speed refers to the time that the shutter is open to expose the film (or the sensor). It’s written in fraction of a second. 8 means 1 second divided by 8. As you can guess, higher is the number, faster is the shutter (1/1000 is faster than 1/8) and each step half the quantity of light to impress the film.
The sensitivity defines how much light the film needs to be properly impressed (corrected exposed). We talk of ISO (or ASA). For each step, we need to twice the previous number by 2 and it needs half of the light for correct exposure. ISO 100 need twice more light than ISO 200. ISO 32000 need twice less light than ISO 16000.
Let’s take a few examples:
1/125 at F2.8 on ISO 100 is the same than 1/512 at F2 on ISO 200
Let’s detail the calculation:
1/125 -> 1/512 = 4 times less light
F2.8 -> F2 = twice more light
ISO 100 -> ISO 200 = The film requires half the quantity of light
Why do you want to set those parameter your self ?
There are several reasons for that.
– You need depth of field. The DOF is the range of distance in focus. The smaller is the aperture, the wider is the DOF. So a lens closed at F8 will have more things in focus than the same lens opened at F2. This is important if you have 2 subject you want in focus at different distance. The DOF goes 2/3 behind the point of focus and 1/3 before.
– You need less depth of field. For a portrait, you want to isolate the subject from the background, so you need to open your lens to reduce the DOF.
– You want to give an impression of speed to a moving subject. You can do that by decreasing the speed and move the camera to follow your subject why you make the photograph. It will blur the background and give a feeling of speed.
– You want to catch a moving target and increase the speed of the shutter (that’s why lenses used by photographers of sport are very big, to catch as much light as possible and use the fastest possible speed).
– You want to have a feeling of grain on your B&W photographs. Of course there are filters to do that, but real photographers use high sensitivity films (or increase the sensitivity of their sensor) to get the same result.
– You want to make photographs in the night, so you need films or sensor with high sensitivity.
Exemples goes on and goes on. Fact is, once a photographer understands those basic principles and is able to calculate fast the correspondant values between an exposure and another (keep the same exposure while changing those parameters), he gets a whole world of possibilities and opportunities to make shots differently.
