As part of the Getty Master Class, students are supposed to produce photographs inspired by the works of Japanese photographer Mikiko Hara who currently has her work on display at the Getty as a part of the In Focus: Tokyo exhibit.
Hara's approach to street photography is very simple. She shoots from the hip, skipping the process of framing her photographs by looking through the viewfinder of her camera. During the initial class meeting, it was reasonable to photograph in this style. She shoots on a vintage Zeiss Ikon 6x6 medium format camera and the viewfinder on that camera is a basic square, not much different than the sight of a gun just in square format. Really rudimentary with little function as parallax is a big problem with such cameras. Shooting from the hip is just a natural approach and she pre-focuses the photo, or rather, she knows the focal length prior to shooting her subject.
I decided to approach this project the same way so I'm shooting film on a Mamiya which is much newer than the camera that Hara uses but the functions are the same. I pre-focused the camera to about 3-5 feet away which I think is a good focal length to capture a great photo. It seems easy in concept but it's much harder in practice. Hara has shot more photos in this style than I have and if I remember correctly, she'll go through multiple rolls of film and her success rate is very low as she has said. I've shot in this style plenty of times before and for this, I've gone through one roll of 220 film (which is a bigger roll of 120) so of the 24 photos that I'm able to take, I think only 6 came out in focus and the most was heavily out of focus. I was disappointed after I received the roll because I thought more of the photos would be in focus since I pre-focused but apparently that wasn't the case.
Out of focus photo shot at the Universal City Redline station
Out of focus people jogging during the Walk for Life event in Northridge.
As you can see from the two images, when I started through the first couple of frames, the photos are REALLY out of focus. If these images were more in focus, I'd have more to work with as far as submitting work for the Master Class. Speaking of which, students that are a part of this class will have the chance to have their photographs on display. Still don't know when the deadline for submissions are as of this entry.
A man attending an art festival at Gladys Park in Skid Row.
As the day progressed, I became more used to shooting from the hip and the photos were more focused than the ones I started the day with. I'd post more in focus photos but I don't want to give away what I may be submitting.
Although Mikiko's photos are shot on color negative film, I have a new roll of black and white in the camera so I'll probably go forward with the next set of photos for the class in black and white so that'd be interesting to see. For the next couple of weekends until I find out the deadline, I plan on dedicating my free time to producing more content for this project so I'm really excited to see what I'm capable of producing.
-Q