It’s been a while since I managed some street, and although I had the opportunity of wandering through London this week, I had only limited time to play with, which generally means my head isn’t in the right place for street. And so it was: no great shots, but some lessons learned nonetheless.
First, a wet evening—high I’ve not shot in a long time and rarely get to shoot at all. And the main lesson learned here was that the high-contrast settings I use for the day don’t really work well at night. I’m normally happy to blow highlights in B&W but the nature of the artificial lighting against the pitch black means that you need to retain much more highlight detail for the image to make sense, while excessive contrast makes it to hard to balance the midtones. Where areas are rather more floodlit, life is a little easier, but for the most part I need to come back with a different image profile. These were all shot with the X100V; most have been cropped but are otherwise out of camera.
Then, a dry day. This time I brought the X-Pro2 and the 16mm f/2.8, and this was a bit of a learning experience in that I’ve not gone that wide on the street for a long time. (And when I have, it’s generally been shooting from the hip with a Ricoh GR/GX rather than from the eye.) It works well for “urban landscape” shots, though it’s a challenge to include a well-proportioned subject, and it gives lots of latitude for cropping. But I was impressed with the performance of the little 16: I’ve had one before, and sold it a while ago, but I never used it on the street. It’s great, though: the AF is fast, it’s ergonomically near-perfect, and it’s nice and sharp.
