Sony RX1, 35mm f2 Carl Zeiss
ISO8000, f/2.5, 1/80, raw
Seventh day of “Night Walking”.
Trastevere, Rome, Train Station.
Bottom line: nobody waits without texting, surfing, emailing, or playing with the phone. It doesn’t matter how long the wait is: thirty seconds is enough to check the email, two minutes fine for checking facebook and changing status, and for very long waits there’s always a game to play or a movie to watch. I guess this will be most of the street photography from now on: either we shoot people walking or actually doing something, or we get people absorbed in their phones. The artist Kim Dong-Kyu made brilliantly clear how the current trend would have changed art if smartphones would have been available in the past centuries: you can enjoy a good selection of his works on Fools Journals.
For a photo like this, being alone (read it, not walking a dog on the leash) is probably an asset. I had to get very close to the guy, and luckily this time I managed to shoot without looking into the camera or at the screen (since there was no other way to make it not obvious at that distance). I just turned my trunk till the camera, hanging from my right shoulder, faced the guy and with my left hand I pressed the shutter, hoping that I would get the focus right. Just one shot, since then the guy decided that in an empty train station we didn’t have to share the same air and moved quite further. The result may not be tack sharp on the guy’s face, but I think the shot still works.