Street Test

I am really just testing the camera on the street to see whether it does what I want. I shot at 800 ISO and it’s not at all clean. I shot at 1/400th of a second at f5.6 and -1 exposure compensation. I know a lot of people say to underexpose to retain detail in the highlights, and there was a reason to do that here, namely that I focused on the ground at about the distance that the woman would be in the foreground, and I knew that if I didn’t use exposure compensation then the sky would be blown out when I raised the camera. But this is a crop and you can’t see the sky. And still I think that the shot would have been cleaner if I had not underexposed.

If you are not sure what I mean about ‘clean’ – to me the woman’s face looks gritty – that’s digital noise.

All of this is a side issue to the look of the woman behind the two men on the right.

I shot this at 27mm full frame equivalent. Why do street photographers always want to shoot with short focal length lenses (28mm or 35mm)? From a bit further away I could have seen this scene much more clearly and taken it with a longer lens.

What is the guy with the leather jacket wearing – has he just had more tattoos and that’s a bandage bound up around his chest? Or is it just what he is wearing? People are so different – the couple with their backs to us are about as different from the two men as you could get.