Street (and incidental AFA report), Part 2: Happiness in The irresistible Urge To Play with Light

Cont’d from the previous:

Which raises an interesting problem.

I’m always looking for moments like this:

Fig 1

captured candidly.

Sometimes it is as simple as how people walk in a crowd

Fig 2

Or a moment of humanising imperfection

fig 3

Or even how the action of performer and character suddenly cannot be told apart

Fig 4

And this leads to a problem. Street photography skirts some edges, but by and large those edges are acceptable, because these are things happening in public any way.

(there is no “through the window photography”. It’s called a number of things, most of them illegal or profane.)

But cosplay brings about a new issue:

If you’re a cosplayer, then you might, reasonably, consider your image to be an asset to be managed. And if I show up with a camera and snap a shot not in line with your image as you wish it to be, then, reasonably, you might wish it gone before it damages your asset.

Full disclosure: I have had four occasions when I have been contacted with a request to detag or fully delete an image from my albums. I have done so, and those images will not resurface; the names of those making the request will not be revealed either. I expect both the absolute number of these requests and the rate of these requests to go up as time goes by.

So. How do I get past that?

I did sit and think for a while after this most recent event, and I have come to the conclusion:

I don’t.

I can’t. It’s not something that is amenable to a single rule, apart from, possibly, never shooting anything that is not staged and posed. You know.

Censorship.

So, rather than rules, I intend to operate on a single principle.

Set up

Fig 5

or totally stealthed, my pictures serve a purpose.

They should make someone other than myself happy

Fig 6

And I think the best way to spread that happiness is to find joy,

Fig 7

And document it

Fig 8

Because joy, like all the best emotions

fig 9

makes us beautiful

Fig 10

Fig 11

Despite whatever physical… disadvantages we may have.

And once you understand that, it’s simple.

I try to tag everyone. I try to contact the people I photograph. I ask them if it’s ok, if they want it taken down. I accept requests of that nature straight up.

Because those photos are supposed to make someone happy.

And if the subject of the photo isn’t happy, if the subject is actively unhappy because of this…

Then I take it down. The subject doesn’t need my photo of them. I don’t need that photo either. I’ll just take it down and move on.

There’s always the next photo.

All photos except fig 11 (which is taken by someone who will not be named for…various reasons involving the letters PDPA, which pop up whenever certain of my circles intersect) are from my AFA day 1 (Album here: )

and AFA day 3 album here

Fig 1: Random photographer, who joked with me that he loved his rangefinder but at his age it was just easier to use Live View.

Fig 2: Crisel Mariz, as Aoba from Dramatical Murder

Fig 3: Niko Riko, as Tohka Yatogami from Date a Live

Fig 4: Sora Ayasaki as Sinon, Sword Art Online

Fig 5: Sairah Sultanah/ Miho Orion. I caught her by surprise by running up behind her on the escalator, calling her name, and shouting SMILE! She was kind enough not to kick me in the face instead.

Fig 6: Narune Honey as… er, I dunno. I forgot to ask (Update: Ririchiyo Shirakiin).

fig 7: Carlos Stark Greywind and Okami Kenpachi doing a power walk

Fig 8: Vienna West as Prussia, in a candid moment.

Fig 9: Asuki Rosa as

Fig 10: Seah E-Hong as… you know, I’ve been photographing him as this for more than a year and I keep on forgetting to ask, but it’s from One Piece.

Last updated July 12, 2015