EYE CONTACT

 It has been 10 days since my last post and I have been doing some thinking about how I want to proceed in my photography hobby. For a lot of years, I was learning, practicing, archiving, etc., as I wanted to eventually make a living as a photographer. My first goal was toward editorial which would allow me to work full-time while building my archives and trying to make submissions to various publishers.

When I did quit my day job, I was fortunate to hook up with a fledgling weekly newspaper. The relationship lasted for a decade before the newsprint industry kinda died in the 2008 recession. I had to return to a previous career field to pay the bills and finally was forced to retire in 2012.

Then I started soul searching to see what I wanted to do in retirement. I sold all my pro gear (too much weight) in favor of mirrorless cameras. After settling down to just a pair of Fujifilm X100S bodies with the WCL and TCL conversion lenses, I thought I was done. But I had grown dissatisfied with that setup and spent the last 10 days trying to figure out what I wanted for gear. To that end, I have now listed all my Fuji gear on eBay as I still try to decide if I want to get a single mirrorless camera with one lens or return totally to film.

The one lens has me asking another question - zoom or prime? Back when I was traveling, I would usually take my trusty Nikon D2H along with the Nikkor 18-200mm DX lens as my main street setup. That allowed me to have a broad range of options. In looking at images from travel, I find no consistency to my shooting other than I used the full range (wideangle, mid-range and telephoto) so I could crop in camera. With the D2H only having 4.1 mp, it was a necessity. But with the Fuji cameras I had only two focal lengths, 28mm and 50mm. However with 16.9 mp sensors, it was easy to crop in post and still do prints up to 12"x18" on my Epson.

This recent image only has a slight crop and I missed a sharp focus on the main subject but I still like the image. It is the eye contact that makes the image for me. As the great Henri Cartier-Bresson said, "sharpness is a bourgeois concept".