GO BACK ONE

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I FIRST HEARD THE PHRASE “RUN AND GUN” applied to street photography in a lecture by the great Joe McNally, a lifelong pro and official worldwide Nikon ambassador and the author of superb tutorials like the classic The Moment It Clicks, who used the term to describe the practice of shooting quickly and intuitively with a minimum of fussing about gear and a deliberate intention toward the instinctual. Trained in rapidly-evolving journalistic environments, Joe was every bit as facile in clicking away at a rapid clip as he was in his most prepared and staged images. This means, despite the term’s wording, that “flexible” is a more important trait than “fast”.

When I must shoot a lot of things in a short space of time, as when I am walking alongside my New York-born wife, who definitely has a “Manhattan stride” and is definitely on a time line (usually a brisk one) to get somewhere and do something, I find that I must make many decisions in the moment. This does not merely mean racking up as many shots as I can physically click off and hoping for the best. It comes down to evaluating situations in the moment, trusting my first instinct on what may or may not constitute a worthwhile shot, and at least being prepared to execute without excess delay.

Obviously, at the end of a R&G day, this results in a fairly bumper crop of images, the value of which can not always be seen when upon first view. The certified killers certainly stand out, as do the abject clunkers, but the vast number of shots in between those extremes sometimes take a while to reveal themselves. I myself have built up the habit of looking back on a given shoot at the distance of at least one year, as it erases many of the first judgements you made about the pictures and allows you some objectivity, as if you are evaluating someone else’s photos, which in a very real sense you are.

Upon my earlier reviews of pics taken on a fairly quick walk through Greenpoint, Brooklyn almost exactly a year ago at this writing, this young woman got lost in the shuffle. She had a special quality, but I was uncertain as to my execution, and so moved on to more obvious prize winners. It’s a sucker bet to act as your own photo editor anyway, as your choices are fraught with both bias and bad habit, but waiting a year can make you look at things in a far different way from when you first chose to click the shutter. Of course, some times you decide that your “blue ribbon” entries from that time aren’t quite the miracles you originally thought they were. But, when a smile comes to you from an unexpected place, well, that’s the whole ball game, innit?