If you’re one of the two or three people who occasionally check out this blog, you know that I haven’t posted anything in quite a while. Although I’ve been busy getting a new exhibit ready to hang in the month of October, I haven’t been so busy that I couldn’t have added something. I guess I’ve just been suffering from end-of-summer laziness. But, on Sunday I made it out to the annual Willy Street Fair. The weather was great, the street was crowded, the music was fun, and young and old alike were having a great time.
My problem is that I’ve never felt comfortable taking pictures of people — people I don’t know, that is. It’s not too bad at events like the Willy Street Fair because there’s a lot of noise and commotion and many other people are snapping photos, too. Photographing people in day-to-day activities on the street, however, is something that I generally avoid. If anybody out there has suggestions on how to overcome that reluctance, please let me know.
[In fact, if there’s anybody out there who’s reading this, I’d love to know. Please enter a short comment like “Marsha from Dubuque” or “Ernst from Berlin.” If you’re not shy, use your real name and town!]
I took quite a few photographs but was more often disatisfied than satisfied with the results. Even when I tried 5 or 6 of the same scene I often found that I didn’t capture the moment that way that I’d hoped — a face turned too soon, another person walked into the scene, a smile disappeared. Since many of the photos were of action, maybe I needed to set the shutter to “rapid fire” mode and shoot that way. I’ll work on it. Trees and mountains don’t move too fast so my landscapes and nature shots never create this kind of a problem!
Here are a few pictures from Sunday afternoon at the Willy Street Fair.
(Click on any photo to enlarge, then use arrows to scroll through the images.)