In the corner of the frame

A few weeks ago while trying out my new Leicaflex on Boulder’s downtown mall I took this shot from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder:

This image is full-frame, uncropped and unstraightened. I just got lucky. But I liked the shot so much I decided to try more street photography, this time with my much newer Nikon D700. To see some of my work, check out my Street Photography gallery.

Photographers disagree on how street photography is to be practiced, especially about whether the photography should be surreptitious. Some make a distinction between the sneaky photographers, who they call voyeurs, and those who make no attempt to conceal themselves, who they call participants. The pejorative choice of words tells us which they think is better.

You can make whatever value judgments you like, but I’m only comfortable doing street photography surreptitiously. Maybe on the streets of New York it wouldn’t matter, but not in quiet Boulder, Colorado.

I’m new at this, so I’ve been trying out various techniques with various degrees of success:

• Setting the camera to fire automatically at intervals (time-lapse) of, say, 4 seconds, and just walking around with the camera around my neck. Sounds crazy, but it produced this shot:
  

• Firing from the hip with my finger operating the shutter, the technique I used for the shot at the top. And for this one:
  

• Similar to the previous method, but firing the shutter from a remote cable in my pocket. This was to avoid anyone seeing my finger on the shutter, which turns out to be entirely unnecessary. No one is looking that closely.
• Using a right-angle mirror on the front of the lens so I can appear to be shooting something at 90° to my actual subject. I haven’t tried this technique and don’t plan to.
• Using a right-angle mirror behind the camera so I can see the LCD from above, as though I had a twin-lens reflex. This works on my D700 because it has live view. I haven’t tried this yet, but will as soon as my mirror attachment arrives. I’ll report on it later. (I wouldn’t need the mirror gadget if the D700 had a pivoting LCD.)
• Looking through the viewfinder and shooting when the subject isn’t watching. I’ve developed a way to this that involves appearing to view something slightly off to the side, peeking at the subject in the corner of the frame, quickly pivoting the camera into position, shooting, and pivoting back while still holding the camera to my eye. Here a shot I took this way:
  

• Using a 180° fish-eye lens, and positioning the subject in the corner. With this technique I can get to within a couple of feet of the subject and they will have no idea they’re in the shot. Since I appear to be photographing something off in the distance, even the D700’s loud shutter isn’t a problem.

I didn’t think the fish-eye technique would be a good one, for several reasons: The subject takes up only a small part of the frame, so extreme cropping is needed, and, since they’re at the edge, they’re distorted. But I decided to try it out today anyway. The results are interesting.

Here’s a shot along with the full-frame image so you can see how much I had to crop it:

Here are four more shots. Some are more distorted than others, depending on how close the subject was to the edge of the frame:

If you’re never used a fish-eye, you might not appreciate just how close I was to these subjects. I was next to the woman smoking, not behind her. For the shot of the guys having lunch, my side was almost against the railing.

So, while the fish-eye technique is certainly works—you can walk right up to your subjects without them suspecting that you’re photographing them—I’m not sure I’ll be doing much of it, for exactly the reasons I listed.