Jim's Photoblog: WWPW 2019

The Worldwide Photo Walk in 2019 was similar to the last eleven I've been on and yet it was in many ways different.

Again, a dozen photographers gathered at the appointed time and place and tried to take some interesting shots to enter in a worldwide contest offering a host of prizes for the top ten images. Once again, the leader - in this case two leaders, Beth and Martin - shook our hands, glanced at our glass and then they introduced themselves. And the introductions went around - again much too quickly, so I repeated the names to myself as best I could - and camera brands were duly noted. Ronja also had a Sony Alpha 7, I noticed. Otherwise, Canikon and phone photographers.

What was different was that I knew the leaders from our walk last year in Tübingen. And they really set the tone for the next several hours that we spent together. And my good friends Andy and Adi were there with their two boys. We have been on over a dozen photowalks together over the years. but what was really different was that the people smiled and looked at each other. Call me strange, but I found this odd in a very good way. These were not artists set on winning the grand prize and showing off their pixel power. They were people who wanted to see Esslingen on a nice fall day (it had just stopped raining) and meet some others who had this similar goal for the day. We even stayed together throughout the walk and took some shots together and taught each other to see in various individual ways. It was fun to be out there again!

Down in the town it was difficult for me to get excited about much that I saw. I was still trying to feel my way into the group, the town, the groove. When we walked up the hill, though, and looked out over the city and saw the vineyards, the groove tapped me on my shoulder and said "Here I am."
Actually, it was just a leaf that Andy had put up on an old gate, but it was enough to get me going.

Then, since Beth had told us to try to surprise her, I started thinking outside of the box. let's go abstract, I thought.

But there wasn't enough direct sunlight to give the photo above what it needed to really shine.
Walking around the corner from this house there was a lot of construction going on which could have provided some real highlights. After all, my biggest show was entitled "Construction without consensus". Now, I may be best known for my series "Looking up" but here I had to look down and look through.

But unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot going on either way. And a construction site without people or some interesting gesture is just a construction site.

Still, I thought the fish-eye reflections in the drainage pipes looked interesting.
Back to abstract thinking. "Ab-stract" means "detached" or "pulled away from". I tried to pull away from reality and representational images and shoot something that was only a composition. That's more difficult than it sounds in photography. When I'm drawing, most things tend toward the abstract. Here is another attempt.

Continuing to think in terms of composition, I came to an underpass as we walked back into town under the main street. With compositions, as with portraits, color rarely distracts from the image. In the photograph above I kept the colors because there were only two and they play a role in the composition. Below, however, the image works better without any competition from the palette.

I was finally rolling, shooting this architecture from various angles until I was satisfied with the image above.
Then we came upon a cute little street in the Beutau-Viertel and saw this possibility. I thought it was pretty cool and imaginative, but nowhere near perfect.

I love playing with reflections because they enable us to see two things - different perspectives, emotions, realities - at once. In a side alleyway I noticed a Vespa and tried a few shots in the rearview mirror, trying to line up the gutter and the vanishing points, or leading lines, as a photographer might call them. I was happy with it, but still not totally satisfied.

I had been to Esslingen numerous times, but had never seen this sculpture before (which doesn't mean it hasn't been there for years; only I had never noticed it before). I tried to make the most of it, but this is all I could manage without wading into the canal.

Then finally, shooting in bracketed bursts (-2, 0, +2 Ev), I passed by the window of a hipster restaurant and, thinking of my best shot from last year in Tübingen, pressed the lens to the window and shot a burst. The +2 shot was taken at 10,000 ISO, but with the Sony A7iii that's like 800 ISO with my old A77. I think this one sums up the afternoon quite well: There I was looking for light (the bulb is out) and patterns and something different in the old town and here it is all in one shot. The overexposure makes it look somewhat out of the ordinary, which is what I like so much about it.

Shortly after 6pm nearly all of us congregated at the Roter Hirsch für some wonderful Swabian food and a very pleasant conversation and exchange of tips and tricks for the future.
I sat myself down in the S-Bahn and headed home. I was so caught up in looking at my pictures from the day, however, that I missed my stop and decided to continue on to the Wasenfest, something I kinda wanted to do anyway. I had a second battery and plenty of room left on my 64GB card; plus, I had a second in the other slot anyway.
The great thing about going through the Wasenfest at night (if you can avoid all the puddles of this and that) is that you are among other photographers who are also looking for great light. I found some.