Should I press the shutter?

NYC Homeless Man, New York, 2025

I’m a very visual photographer. I don’t study a scene before I take a picture. I simply don’t have the time. In most cases, within a fraction of a second, the moment is gone. I may have pressed the shutter or abstained.

Yes, I may see a scene developing in the distance, but rarely does it come to anything.

I can fixate on someone wearing glasses. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because, particularly sunglasses, I don’t have the chance to wear them anymore.

With this particular shot, I broke my golden rule. Don’t photograph people who may be down and out… down at heel… suffering or struggling in any way. That covers pretty much anyone sat on the street. Drunk and disorderly would have been a different matter, but this chap was definitely in one of the former categories.

In my 48hrs in New York, there were surprisingly few beggars (for want of a better term) on the streets. This was a good thing to notice about society. A lot different from the photographs from the ’60s and ’70s that I’m used to seeing in books of street photography. Oddly, there are very famous photographs of blind people in books by the most notable street photographers.

But this picture provided quite the dichotomy. Both at the time I pressed the shutter and the couple of seconds before that instant.

You see, to take the photograph or not weighs heavily on my mind as I’m walking around. Both in the ‘will it be interesting to the viewer’ feeling and the ‘will I upset the person I’m photographing’ thoughts.

Every so often, the balance will sway to the ‘I need to take this picture’, even though there is a potentially homeless person as a feature of the composition and there is a good chance I will upset them. I’m compelled to break my rules.

In this case, the dichotomy between the man on the floor and the chap in the white suit looking very regal was too much for me to resist. That I pressed the shutter at the moment the man on the floor was eyeing up the suited chap was an unexpected bonus. One of those cases where a glance by a subject in a picture made my decision to press the shutter worthwhile.

What I didn’t realise at the time was also that the homeless man was wearing the purest white sneakers!

I don’t have the time to read anything into a scene. I just have a feeling that the picture (if it is correctly exposed and well developed) will work.

After I had developed the roll of film that this picture was a part of, I didn’t look at it for the next few months for my golden rule breaking reason. I find I have to do this often as my thoughts are so invested in what I felt at the time of pressing the shutter. Distancing myself from those feelings can help me understand a picture more from the point of view of someone seeing the moment rather than seeing what I saw as the photographer.

Distancing myself from pictures I take by not looking at them for a few months can change my feelings completely about a shot. Changing my mind from what I thought was a great picture because of what I felt in the build up to it, something only I know, into a mediocre image and vice versa. I can revisit pictures shot months or even years ago that I didn’t think much of at the time that now have a completely new perspective.

Thankfully, when I lifted the Leica to my eye, what I thought would be a good shot was, and it now ranks high in my favourites.

I hope you think the same too.