For Marion’s birthday I bought her David Gibson’s excellent book “The Street Photographer’s Manual”. (Thanks to Amazon it arrived overnight and at a slight discount from retail.)
It’s not because Marion shoots boring photos. To the contrary Marion was born with the gift of being able to “see” a photo in front of her. As a relative newcomer to street photography Marion often brings home better composed and more interesting photos than I do.
And there’s a reason for that. As a long-time photojournalist and photography teacher and now in my retirement an enthusiastic street photographer I know how to handle my equipment whether digital or film and regardless of whether 35mm format or 2 1/4″ and whether shooting black and white or in colour.
I know when I go out walking the streets I am going to come back with something at the very least technically correct and competent in content. (And BTW I never ever post my missed shots and only post my best. This is a suggestion more people who post images on FaceBook might consider.)
When Marion goes out we set her equipment up to do as much of the technical heavy lifting as possible so as to free her to use her “vision” and her imagination to create simply amazing images in her viewfinder.
Every time she goes out to shoot she comes back with something unique and better than the time before. We definitely have two photographers in the house now.
So why this book?
The answer is to be found daily on the photography enthusiast’s Facebook sites where more often than not we are overwhelmed with hundreds of truly boring, vacuous and uninteresting static images of buildings, of trees, of dogs, of people (often shot from behind), of colour patches and the list goes on…and on…and on.
You see author David Gibson almost quit photography because he found the emphasis on technology and camera type and lens being used to be of no interest. Where so much of this technical drivel is the main focus of FaceBook comments (Oh please tell us what lens and what camera you used!!!) it has nothing to do with photography.
Gibson, like so many other photographers he references, shoots with basic cameras available to any of us and only uses one or two simple lenses. He shoots in “P” mode (which for newcomers is a semi-automatic mode in digital cameras. Unlike aperture mode so often used by fashion and creative professional photographers, P mode frees the photographer from making needless technical decisions when it comes to street photography.)
I am true believer that to become a better photographer who is capable to shooting more interesting and publishable images you have to be reading photography books written by professional photographers.
Our little photo library is growing and I can highly recommend Gibson’s “The Street Photographer’s Manual” to you.
StreetShooters 
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