Hugh Rawson 6/3/18 Hugh Rawson 6/3/18

Brilliant Mistake

Since watching the Champions League Final I have been thinking a lot about making mistakes. For the uninterested football avoiders or those who have been dormant for whatever reason, Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius made two catastrophic errors which effectively cost his side the game and the trophy. Uninterested football avoiders please bear with me.

Goalkeeper has to be the most vulnerable position in football. Most mistakes are immediately punished. And punishment is swift and harsh, particularly from your own fans. Football fans have long memories. An outfield player, on the other (ungloved) hand, is given more leeway. The tragedy of this situation is that for Karius this will almost certainly have been the biggest match in his career and he will probably be forever remembered for it. It will take some spectacular keeping in matches and seasons to come to change people’s memories.

Karius won’t agree with me right now, I’m sure, but I think mistakes can be brilliant. Aren’t they how you learn? Take riding a bike; your body’s muscle memory soon learns what to avoid if it wants to make skimmed knees and bleeding elbows things of the past. Take making a curry; too spicy and it’s unpalatable - you go easy next time. Travel overnight to that once in a lifetime sunrise without a battery for your camera - you check next time (and every time thereafter). It’s these mistakes that help you focus your skills into becoming a better cyclist, curry chef, photographer....

The important thing is that when things go wrong you look at why they went wrong and you go again. You get back on that bike. By doing that, you are making sure that you learn from that mistake.

The mistake becomes your best teacher.

Street photography is high paced with scenes opening and closing before you in the blink of a 1/500 shutter. You often don’t have time to think about what you have just shot, let alone check it in the viewfinder, before the next three scenes establish themselves in front of you. There is little time to learn as you go. The exception is the mistake that actually prevents you getting the shot. How often have you you switched the camera off then continued to shoot nothing? Forgotten to remove the lens cap for that best shot of the day? These things all happen to all of us and we shrug and move on, vowing never to make the same mistake again.

The time to learn from mistakes is very often later on - pausing for a coffee and checking back on the screen or when the images appear in the darkroom or computer monitor. That’s when you get a chance to critically review your work. Some mistakes you can correct with increasingly sophisticated software - under/over exposure probably being the key fixable error. Other mistakes you just have to make the best of or give up on but put right next time. If you are shooting a familiar place then you can probably make sure you position yourself better next time. If it was a one off situation, you just have to accept that your mistake will be burned into your memory and you will avoid making the same one next time.

It’s worth saying, at this point, that street photography is a very hard task master and is pretty unforgiving in its hit rate. Most of what I shoot is not for public consumption because it falls short of what I had envisaged and of what I would want anyone else to see. It is always disheartening to download a day’s worth of images and then sift the ones that are keepers. There are so few. Some are mediocre at best. The vast majority are immediately deleted.

Thankfully, we forget the ones we delete. It’s the select few that we go to work on - processing to a greater or lesser degree - and its these images that embed themselves in our memories and on our hard drives.

And just occasionally, a mistake turns out to be a hit. Regular readers/viewers of my work will know that I am drawn to windows for framing, for giving glimpses into interior worlds and sometimes for the reflections. The problem with shooting into windows is very often that what you see with your naked eye is different to what the camera sees. This can lead to disaster or a fortuitous happenstance, as in today’s picture. I was wanting a shot of the lady (btm right) and her friend (edited out to the left) but the reflections had other plans. I think it works.

It’s good to keep learning - not just in photography but in all we do - and mistakes are an integral part of that. When we are afraid to try, for fear of failing, we will learn nothing. After all, penicillin was a happy accident - a brilliant mistake.

Hugh Rawson 3/11/18 Hugh Rawson 3/11/18

Never a dull moment.

I find that when I go out specifically to take photos that I can’t allow myself other distractions or it just doesn’t work. I’m not the kind of photographer who can listen to headphones while I shoot (much as I wish I could) or text, eat, drink or any of the other things which seem to count as essential to modern life. Maybe it’s a bloke thing - after all, I’m not half as good at multi-tasking as my wife or female colleagues. I have to be in the zone and focused on just that one task.

I am rarely bored. Whenever I find I have time on my hands, my camera seems to magically create a host of photographic opportunities. If I’m alone, even in the most familiar of places, give me time and a camera and suddenly the scene has great potential. It doesn’t matter if I’ve never been there before or I know the place like the back of my hand. There is aways something to see.

Obviously, having time means I will look around and notice things that otherwise may never have caught my eye. Throw a little patience into the equation and, of course, opportunities will appear the longer I wait.

This morning, sitting alone in a cafe I know well, I became aware, for the first time, of the light coming through the doors. These are doors I’ve walked through many times. This time I was alone, with time to kill. That light was just waiting for the right character to silhouette themselves there. And suddenly my morning was transformed.

Hugh Rawson 6/18/17 Hugh Rawson 6/18/17

A Link from the Past

The more photographs I take, the more I am convinced that photographers learn from those greats who have gone before...

The more photographs I take, the more I am convinced that photographers learn from those greats who have gone before; standing on the shoulders of giants to capture that awesome view or decisive moment - and an occasional indecisive one too. Of course, being in the right place helps.

Last weekend I had the truly great pleasure of being invited to spend the evening on one of the corporate boxes above the finish line at Goodwood races. Even better, this included a car to and from the racecourse; champagne to drown our losses and toast our victories [few]; our own chef; and the perfect reason to leave work about as early as was both feasible and polite as the boss on a Friday night.

Weather wise, it could hardly have been better. The Sussex downs were bathed in a golden light for several hours and stretched for as far as the eye could see and further than my 35mm lens wanted to go.

Between courses there was the opportunity to escape the air-conditioned life of the box and mingle with everyone else by the track. This is where the bookies with their fixed faces line up to relieve you of your notes and replace them with dreams while their expression switches to the next punter in line. This is where overdressed men swelter in the late sun and under-dressed women, fuelled by plastic pints of warm beer or swinging half empty bottles of Moët, stumble precariously on skyscraper heels. It's an oasis for a thirsty street photographer.

Each race brought a new flutter and a five minute amble among these gradually less stable fellow racegoers as their expressions became more jovial [or less so] as their own personal cocktail of winnings, losses and alcohol slashed back and forth.

Most of my shots were taken up close (obeying Robert Capa’s maxim that if your photos aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough) but I took picture above as it seemed to capture the evening en masse. I particularly liked it because it reminded me of Winston Link's drive in movie shot and it was this classic image that I had in mind when I took it.

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/97601516906397814/

We truly do learn by looking at the masters and the more we invest in looking at the great photographs the more our own work will grow, I'm convinced of this.

Hugh Rawson 1/15/17 Hugh Rawson 1/15/17

Shoot first. Ask Questions Later. or Better to seek forgiveness than ask permission.

I think the question that I am asked most often is whether I ask permission to photograph people on the street. And if not, how do I get away with it - by which I assume there is surprise that I haven’t been thumped or beaten around the head by my rolled up street map. Or worse.

I don't ask. Fundamentally, I guess the difference is that while the people I shoot would like the world to see them as they would want the world to see them ... I don't. I want the world to see them as they really are. Or as they sometimes are - when they are off guard. This isn't out of some inherent cruelty. It's more a question of truth. After all, isn't that what Art concerns itself with?

The other element in this is that I am not a typical portrait photographer. I wouldn’t know where to begin with posing someone or giving direction. So I have to take what I see.

Finally, I would much prefer to shoot someone caught in what Cartier-Bresson called "the decisive moment." Not some clever, long held pose.

So, I rarely ask permission. There have been rare exceptions. A few months ago, I happened across a Harley-Davidson biker run for charity with all riders dressed as Santa Claus and collections made for local primary schools - something of an interesting shift away from cultural expectations and therefore rich with opportunity. I prowled among the riders with my camera at my hip, finger on the back-button, ready to shoot. And I shot a few. Then I made eye contact; a fatal error. Eye contact with a tall, tattooed, bearded and leather clad ring-leader in his worn waistcoat adorned with his name. Basher.

The omens weren’t good.

So I asked. And he smiled. Posed. And I clicked. It should have been mean, moody and confrontational. Had I had the sense to direct him, I could maybe have got something halfway to what I wanted. And what I wanted was definitely Basher going about his business as, well, a basher. Instead I got the smiling, bearded, Santa imitator - no amount of gritty post-processing would deliver the shot I wanted; the shot I could have got if I’d kept my mouth shut and my eyes down.

Most recently, on a street photography jaunt around London, I noticed two young office workers enjoying early refreshment along the south bank of the River Thames. Nothing unusual about that except that it was extremely cold (being January), they were already gulping down Laurent Perrier champagne, and had clearly been out all night since finishing work the day before. “Make us Facebook famous,” they laughed; I had already shot them from the hip, capturing the wide open champagned arms and flailing cigarette. Would they have chosen beer stained shirts, sleepless eyes and hangover hair for their portrait shoot? I doubt it. Yet somehow, the shot was closer to the truth - for that day at least.

Surely that is the essence of street photography.

Hugh Rawson 8/14/16 Hugh Rawson 8/14/16

Starting out - why now?

When I do things I do them with a passion. Pretty much an obsession. And this is where photography is with me right now. A camera has never been far from my hand over the past three years and it has taught me to see things very differently; definitely to appreciate things more. I even notice what's around me these days.

In April, I took a photograph of a man, wrapped warmly against the cold spring morning, standing on the south bank of the River Thames, looking across the water towards St Paul's Cathedral. I went on to take many other photos that morning, wandering the streets of the city as they began to fill, before heading home for lunch. A great way to spend a Sunday. I was already pleased with this one, along with half a dozen others that day.