Good Day All:

Like everyone else I suspect, I have not had a lot of time to look at and do something with the pictures taken at Meridian Park. Appended nonetheless are a few that I've been working on (in PS) though none are finished.

Since this is a class from which explanations might help let me preface by saying that I was trying to do something different from the way I have generally taken pictures of sculptures and statues. I thought I might get in really close, use a wide angle, and focus on a particular feature  - in this case the hands.

So much for what I thought I was doing. In almost every case the focal length I discovered ex post was in the 80-90mm range which will hardly qualify as "wide angle". At the time I was taking the best shot that I thought would give me the image I wanted. Evidently, I had serially overridden the practice I had set for myself.

Why "wide-angle" and why "close"?  The week before I had been having considerable difficulty getting focus and exposure properly lined up in the street shots I was taking; a couple of us discussed the problem during one of the breaks in the class. So I started looking at a couple of "how-to" blogs. Surely everyone has the same problem with fast moving scenes - no time to get all the knobs and buttons sorted?

The blog advice was as follows. Set the camera to F8; use a wide angle set at around 24mm; focus at an object some 12 feet away. That's it - one doesn't have to worry about things being in focus again as, at these settings, everything between about 5 feet and infinity will be in focus.

One has set the aperture. The requisite exposure now will be a simple function of the Speed and ISO settings - and one can easily discover with a couple of shots in the prevailing light, at what ISO settings one will get shutter speeds at which the camera can be comfortably hand held.

If there is a "downside" it is this. You have to get really close to "the action" to take pictures this way. But that seems to be acceptable to the photographers on these blogs.

So much for the pontification ( - likely most in the class already knew this).  As mentioned I ended up shooting at focal lengths very different from what I intended - my thought had been to practice a wee bit on statues which don't move except in the opera.

Anyway, here's a sampling from a busy day.

The above are taken of the two statues that sit next to Buchanan just as you enter the park from the lower end of 15th.

The above are of the fellow who explored the various ways we will be punished in the afterlife.

Buchanan, left and right.

 And here are some "candids" I took at the end of a very long day from a long distance away, using a telephoto but where the crops still needed to be blown up considerably. About 20 minutes separate the first two pictures from the third. Don't they seem like an intrusion? a not very pleasant voyeurism? Sontag, I read, labelled flaneurs "connoisseurs of empathy" - but it hardly fits.

Best All,

Farid