Sometimes when you are out prowling the streets it seems as if there are no photo opportunities at all. Especially if you are treading familiar spots. You bring the camera up to your eye and scan around but everything looks boring. This of course isn't how street photography works. Sit down somewhere and watch the world go by for half an hour or so. I guarantee you will see photo opportunities without even looking for them. Most you wouldn't have been able to catch anyway. Point is that they are there.

A week or two back I wandered around Zürich for a morning and shot a single film, rather aimlessly. Shooting black and white it was a misty day and should have been good for the sort of images I like - but nothing. Finally on the way home I was coming up the steps to the railway platform and. voila, there was the shot.

Maybe not a Pulitzer Prize winner, but it snapped into view at the time, and I liked it as soon as the negative was scanned. A combination of the silhouette against the misty background and the strong composition provided by the perspective lines. Another thing that contributes is the low angle of view as I came up the steps.

Actually this wasn't the first shot - this was. Spot the difference?

As you can see from the clock it was taken three seconds earlier (Who needs EXIF with Swiss railway clocks around) However waiting these three seconds gave me the actual shot where one of the girls just flexed her leg. A small thing but for me it makes all the difference.

Now this is the shot as I saw it. I obviously liked the emptiness at the left side, concentrating the action in the intersection of the perspective lines. Compositionally speaking, it might be better to crop it as here.

Generally I don't like cropping if it's the "picture-within-a-picture" type. Every image provides opportunities for this. However sometimes cropping works and retains the idea of the original that you "saw". In this case a square crop is probably better aesthetically, but the tightness of the composition is at odds with the scene that I saw, which depended on the emptiness of the platform. So I like both versions, but my affections lie with the original.

Any morals? Well the obvious one is just keep your camera at the ready. The photos will come.

These images Leica M3, Summicron 50mm, TRI-X. I can't remember but I guess 1/250 at F8