Street Photography Revisited on the 4th of July

There were thousands of people in the small town making it a perfect environment for some candid photography. Being a Western town, there were a lot of horses and riders. In my previous posting I had shared some pictures from the Rodeo in Prescott, and some of the riders, their horses and the Rodeo clowns were also in the parade.

After a few minutes of looking around, I decided to focus on the theme of “Horses and Riders” but all was very methodically organized and I did not find an unusual or unexpected event to photograph. Instead, decided to focus on shapes and forms of the interaction between horses and humans.

… Well-worn cowboy boots contrast well with horses’ hoofs. So, as a cowboy was taking the saddles off the horses, I hoped to compose a few scenes.

This one seems like a dance..

It often takes patience to compose that one shot that not only fits a theme I have in mind but is affected by variables I cannot control. Such as a sudden shading in part of the scene due to a passing cloud. This picture got affected by the uneven lighting but helped the picture to stress the shape of the woman handling the horses.

Then, a group of ladies, of a certain age, arrived dressed as Rodeo Clowns. This picture was not composed intentionally, but as I looked at the printed image I could not resist smiling: A clown of the World’s Oldest Rodeo seemed to taking her own pulse to make sure all is ok!

Finally, I noticed another photographer who was taking candid pictures but using a large tripod! I was thinking that it was the anti-thesis of street photography techniques to be noticeable, as it becomes interference in the natural flow of human behavior hence makes the end product, the photograph, biased.  As I was revisiting the basic principles of what Henry Cartier-Bresson had made so popular (using a pocket size 1954 Leica IIIF for his most famous pictures), the perfect composition present itself: the photographer , on his knees behind his most noticeable tripod, was taking a picture of a woman who in turn was taking a “selfie” with her phone! The woman was perfectly in line between me and the other photographer allowing me to make the point that street photographers should be stealth and unnoticed.

But who knows? Perhaps his pictures are perfectly framed and not affected by hand movements I often have to keep in mind when I shoot handheld while trying to continuously focus my 50 or 60 year old lenses…

July 4, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015