Finding Middle Gray

This is a well known photo of mine titled Man With Hat. I remember taking this photograph while on a day off from work, and I used the techniques I teach in the book Finding Middle Gray. It took me only a second to two to get my exposure and set my camera. Below is a little bit about the day I took this photo.

Man With Hat by John Strazza

Man with Hat may be one of my better known images and it will probably surprise you to know how simple the process was, technically speaking anyway. From a visual seeing point of view it was not as easy. On the technical end —I had a Voigtlander Bessa R rangefinder type camera with a 25 mm Skopar lens with me that day. This is a very small camera and a tiny lens, very light. I used an incident light meter, Sekonic 308, and took an incident reading of the light to know what I was dealing with in terms of exposure. If I recall the exposure was around 125 and f8. I don’t take notes so I’m not completely sure. And with this camera and 25 mm lens set all I needed to do was set the focus of the lens at 15 or 20 feet. I knew everything would be in sharp because this lens has some serious depth of field. This all took about 30 seconds or less. I was using black and white 35mm film, probably Plus X set to ISO 80. It wasn’t great light —the bright light I so often love to shoot in. It was just kinda grey.

As far as how I felt taking this image, it was not a normal street experience for me. I usually walk fast and move through the streets. I don’t usually follow anything or anyone —rather I usually let things come into my frame. In this case I did see this man and I did wait and watch. As he moved into the place where he was just standing and looking over the water, I knew I had to move quick and try for an image. I stood behind him for only a few seconds and took two frames and moved on. I barely looked into my viewfinder. I was pre-focused and pre-set with my exposure. That’s the great advantage of doing an incident reading before you get started —it frees yo to just take the shot and not worry about the light.