CCC Forum

Covent Garden

Did you get any comments from the stall holder? Trying these shots in Spitalfields market has seen some interesting "feedback", including my shooting companion being aggressively followed, shoved about and insulted! My own experience is stall holders don't like being photographed

davidc wrote:Did you get any comments from the stall holder? Trying these shots in Spitalfields market has seen some interesting "feedback", including my shooting companion being aggressively followed, shoved about and insulted! My own experience is stall holders don't like being photographed

I would imagine that stall holders in well known places like Spitalfields get fed up with having cameras shoved in their faces, but that is one of the more extreme reactions I have heard of. Of course, the person involved might have had other reasons not to want to be photographed.

I have had no problems taking photographs at other places where cameras are less frequently seen, although one trader in Surrey Street Market did ask me if I was from HMRC. Similarly, I had no issues when shooting my Wells market day series last year. In Greenwich Market last year I did have someone complain when I took a photograph of their stall, but that's another place where there seems to be a low tolerance of photographers. Anyway, it turned out to be a boring image, so I did not even end up using it.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=507&p=2622&hilit=wells+market#p2622

This shot is a candid, although I was using a different camera to the one I used for "Reading", so I did not use the same technique I described in that post.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=963

Since I had a manual focus camera this time, I prefocused a 35 mm focal length lens at between 6' - 8', set it to f/5.6 to get a reasonable DOF and used aperture priority. The camera was on a neck strap, so I rested it on my stomach, estimated the field of view and shot blind. It is a quiet shutter and there was a fair bit of ambient noise, so no one was any the wiser. There is an element of luck and it does not always work, camera shake being one of the problems, but that's part of the fun and it's rewarding when you get something which works.

Perhaps the London branch of the RPS do too much street photography in Greenwich!

davidb wrote:Perhaps the London branch of the RPS do too much street photography in Greenwich!

Maybe, but as the caption says, this was taken in Covent Garden.

Nor was it a RPS meet.