Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Spray & Pray And...

Ashamedly, I've looked at wasted waaay too much time on "street photography" videos. It's a bad addiction, like obsessively eating food without really enjoying or tasting it. It's gotten to the point where I watch them just to revel in how obviously and uniformly bad they are- actually, the production values are usually quite high, as for the content... Photograph of man crossing the street, photograph of man on phone, photograph of man in front of sign and/or billboard, photograph of bits and pieces of somewhat randomly matching colors hither and yon- all presented as genuinely successful examples of... street photography! 

So I was delightfully surprised coming upon this Nick Turpin video, not only can aspiring photographers learn valuable tips from someone who actually knows what they're doing- it also contained something that was actually revelatory! I've always considered "spray and pray" an affront to anyone trying to achieve consistent, quality results- and yet, right there (start around 7:45) is living proof that it can, in fact, be an occasionally useful tool. Proof positive of a rather wonderful photograph that wouldn't have existed otherwise- it just occurred too damn fast for normal human reaction, make that too fast even for human sight!

Then again, it should be noted that he employed this tactic in a content rich situation where something that good just may occur, it's just amazing (least to me) to witness it happen in real time. And ya can't argue with real time results. Am I now switching my shutter button to "Continuous?" Hardly, but I am going to consider it on certain occasions, more than I have before ...

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