so here we are now again, back in our former and highly likely future home town, hamburg. we are going to have some days of city exploration and want to use the time to get used to the current influences, too. first of all hamburg's people are in the center of my attention: how have they changed since the last couple of years and did they change at all? today i had optimal conditions for an undetected observation of this type - hurricane christian was approaching and distracted the already busy humans with its wind speeds up to 160 km/h, even 193 km/h were measured by the seaside. i thought about different appropriate possibilities to document the various kinds of citizens, while tina was extensively looking for new books in a huge store in the heart of the city shortly before closing time. in the end i decided to take an approach with respect to the privacy of each of them, photographing the people in front of an illuminated shop window of a decadent hamburgish brand. the backlight and proper exposure should make for graphic outlines here, i wanted to get calm surfaces and keep the persons' anonymity.
besides that i wanted to lead the attention exclusively to the actors, so that I chose an equal point of view for each of the shots, photographing from the hip with a tilted screen. i set the camera to f5.6, ISO1600 and 1/500th of a second (except for the photos with blurred motion, which were shot with f11 and 1/8th of a second) and froze the exposure to obtain exactly similar looking results. so i stood there leaning at a cycle stand for round about one hour and fired and fired.
i think the results are pretty interesting: although i wasn't able to capture all the scenes i initially had in my mind, i got a decent, significant assortment of characters on their way to wherever. the four film strips below include the expressions and gestures of various kinds of humans, that all have passed my line of view within one hour at this particular, stormy evening. well, i have to admit, that the assortment is not significant in terms of quantity: i took exactly 300 pictures, and at least the half of the people i photographed were smoking or fiddling with their mobile devices...
btw: the new automatic upright function of lightroom 5 made the post-processing of this many samples a lot easier for me. good feature, adobe! click on the images below for a better view and let me know, what you think about my fast attempt to portrait hamburg's people.
