I have been a photographer for a long time. My first camera was a Nikkormat FT, and later a second body: a Nikkormat FT2. I still have the FT2, though I haven't used it in quite some time.

For a very long time I did static pictures: flowers, buildings, rocks... things that I never had to interact with. For those types of pictures I occasionally used a 4x5 inch Crown Graphic press camera. For fine detail, nothing can match a 4x5 or larger negative taken with a good lens. Most of Ansel Adams' famous Yosemite work was taken using an 8x10 inch view camera. Unfortunately, the lens I had, while very good optically, had an essentially broken shutter. The only pictures I could take with the thing HAD to be either inanimate or dead! The fastest shutter speed I could use was 1-2 seconds.

Since I started shooting digital as well as film, I have changed my tune about what to shoot. Oh, I still take the odd picture of a flower or something else that strikes my fancy, but these days I find myself more interested in people photography. Mainly portraits, and mostly street portraits.

I love wandering around with a camera on the lookout for interesting faces to photograph. Then the issue becomes "Do I ask permission or not?".

The results are profoundly different. Pointing a camera at someone without their permission can create all KINDS of problems...anywhere from simply having them turn away or raise a hand to block their face, to yelling at you or to even more extreme behavior. I have never experienced anything but the first two. No one has hit me...yet!

But if you ask their permission, you often get the 'snapshot smile', which I HATE! I'd rather have a picture showing me some hostility or mistrust. I have often instructed subjects to try and look really annoyed. Unfortunately, that just makes most people laugh.

And I really like shooting film more than digital. In all seriousness, an image made with a good lens on a reasonably fine grained film is JUST BETTER than that same image made with a digital camera.

But you sure can't beat digital for convenience. And digital can help defuse any tricky subject problems. If I can show someone the picture I just took, that will often make them more favorably disposed to me as a human being!

As far as shooting digitally goes, I will most often shot in RAW mode and then use Adobe Camera Raw to process the image. Shooting RAW gives you much finer control over the image, and can be used to great advantage to correct problems. In one case, I was in Africa shooting in tungsten light, and had set my white balance for tungsten light. I then moved outside into a gray and rainy day but forgot to reset my white balance. Since the pictures were shot in RAW mode, it was a simple operation to change the white balance of the affected photos.

I will also shoot in manual mode when the lighting conditions indicate that the camera metering system might have a problem. Modern camera metering systems are really very good, but there are situations where the camera will get it wrong. Anyone who has tried to shoot a picture with a lot of snow or ice in the frame has seen the problem. The camera's meter tries to make an exposure that averages out to 'middle gray', and so you end up with a picture with lots of gray snow! If you understand the basics of exposure and know how to use your camera in manual mode, you will know how to solve these problems.