1284 - Soul Food To Go

Some people will tell you they can perfectly frame an image like this, but chances are that they lie.

I used the Nikon 70-300 VR at 300 mm. The inherent advantage of a stabilized lens over a stabilized sensor is never more manifest than with a real long lens, and an equivalent of 450 mm, that is real long. This advantage is, that the viewfinder image is stabilized and framing is much easier.

But still, on the street, photographing people with a long lens, you are incredibly dependent on chance. You need the people in the right place, you don’t have much time for playing with focus, things have to align, your line of sight must be free, and because mergers frequently look odd, especially with the compression of a long lens, you want your subject to be in front of a clean background.

In this particular image I had the problem, that the top of the image was cut off. Most of the lamp in the foreground was missing. I had another image though, and although even that was missing a bit at the top, I was able to reconstruct everything in Photoshop. Fake? Maybe, but just try and frame that in less than a second. Maybe you can. I couldn’t 🙂

This guy seems to be delivering a Pizza, but as I have no pizza songs (even “food” is scarce), I have decided to make “Soul Food To Go” the Song of the Day. It’s from the excellent 1987 Manhattan Transfer album “Brasil”. That was two years before David Byrne’s “Rei Momo” and three years before Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints”. The Manhattans really were up to something 🙂

YouTube has the song.