A New Lease of (Street) Life

I was strangely drawn in to a great 2nd hand camera shop in Edinburgh a few weeks ago. So it was of little surprise that, after staring at the displays and wee chat with the owner, I walked out with a new second-hand lens for my Pentax ME Super. The ME Super was my first 'proper' camera (Christmas 1989 if I remember correctly) and it periodically gets a new lease of life as I re-discover it and decide to shoot some film for a change.

Putting a 24mm f2.8 on it has changed 'periodically' to 'regularly'. I've given myself a new side-project to specifically use the ME Super & 24mm to shoot street/candid photography on my regular walk from London Waterloo to Soho.



I'm 2 rolls of Ilford HP5 into this project so far and I'm loving it. The light at this time of year is great with lots of little pools and slashes of sunlight against the dark buildings in the morning and evening. And, as it's central London there always seems to be someone interesting to try and shoot. The real challenge is to find interesting subjects that coincide with the interesting light.





I'm keeping the main gallery of images on flickr for now as I've been playing with their mapping tool to give a little geographic information along with the images.



Shooting manual focus at f8 turns out to be a pretty good set-up too. The camera's centre weighted metering is normally pretty good and I can still over-ride with some exposure compensation for trickier exposure situations. Ilford HP5 rated at iso400 is, at this time of the year, more than fast enough to keep things hand held and moving quickly.



Also, as London is full of people either taking photos or in too much of a rush to notice, my little ME Super and I go pretty much un-noticed as we wander through it all looking for people and pictures. I think this little project could run on for quite some time.