I shoot black-and-white film in the street, downtown and on the El, on weekends and before work. I'm not a professional. I have a desk job and a camera bag, and the bag is the part I think about. This page is the notes I'd have wanted three years ago: how to set the camera so you never have to look at it, how to stand in a crowd without being a problem, who to study, and what one roll actually looks like when it comes out of the tank. No pictures. I don't own a scanner and I'm not sure a 72-dot-per-inch version of a silver print is a picture anyway. Words for now.

A secondhand 35mm rangefinder, older than I am, with a 35mm lens. That's the whole kit. I'm not going to name the make because it doesn't matter and because people get religious about it. What matters:

• A rangefinder focuses with a little double image in the viewfinder that you line up; there's no mirror, so nothing flips up and blacks out the finder when you fire, and the shutter is a quiet click instead of a slap. You see the moment happen. Also the finder shows you a little outside the frame lines, so you can see what's about to walk in.
• A 35mm lens is a bit wider than the eye's natural attention. It makes you get close — six to ten feet — which is the whole discipline. From across the street with a long lens you get surveillance, not photographs.
• Manual everything. No autofocus to hunt, no motor to whine, no battery to die in January. The camera is set before I leave the house and I touch two things all day: the shutter button and the film advance.
• Film: Tri-X. Kodak's 400-speed black-and-white, the same film every street photographer I admire used for fifty years. Forgiving of a stop of error either way, grainy in a way that looks like the city, and I can develop it in the bathroom. I buy it in 100-foot rolls and load my own cassettes to save money. Roughly 36 frames per roll, two or three rolls on a good Saturday.

Everything else — a spare roll in each pocket, a lens cloth, a pencil, no bag if I can help it. A camera bag says "photographer." A camera on a wrist strap under a jacket says "guy walking."

You don't focus in the street. There isn't time and it makes you look down. You set the focus once, using the depth-of-field scale on the lens, so that everything between some near distance and some far distance is acceptably sharp, and then you forget the focus ring exists. That's zone focusing.

With a 35mm lens the numbers are kind:

Those are the hyperfocal distances, give or take; the scale on your lens will show you exactly. My default in daylight is f/11, focus at 12 feet, and everything from the person next to me to the skyline is sharp. In the shade under the El I open up to f/8 and focus at 17, and I accept that the guy two feet away is going to be soft. If I want someone close and I know it's coming, I preset to six feet and wait for them to walk into it. The subject does the focusing. You do the timing.

Half my frames are made without the camera at my eye. It hangs at chest height on a short strap, zone-focused, my thumb on the advance and my finger on the button, and when something happens I turn my body toward it and press. No raising, no aiming, no "photographer" posture to change what's in front of me. The 35 is wide enough that I'll get it, and the frame will be tilted, and the tilt is fine; some of the best pictures ever made in a street are tilted.

It takes practice to know what the camera sees from down there. Shoot a few rolls of nothing — just walking, firing at things you're looking at — and compare the contact sheet to what you remember seeing. After a while your chest has a viewfinder in it. On the El I hold it in my lap, pointed across the aisle, and look out the window.

The other half of the frames, I bring it up and look. When the light's good, when there's a composition to be made and not just a moment to be caught, when I've decided to be seen. Both ways are honest. The hip is for speed and for not changing the scene. The eye is for when you have a second and a half.

My camera has no meter and I stopped carrying one. Sunny 16: in full sun, set the aperture to f/16 and the shutter to the film speed — for Tri-X that's 1/400, so 1/500. Same light, f/11 at 1/1000 or f/8 at 1/2000 if the camera has it, or f/11 at 1/500 and let it be a little over; Tri-X doesn't mind. Then adjust for the light:

• bright sun, hard shadows: f/16 at 1/500
• hazy sun, soft shadows: f/11
• overcast, no shadows: f/8
• open shade, or under the El tracks on a bright day: f/5.6
• inside a train car in daylight: f/4 at 1/250 or so, and hold still

At night downtown, under the streetlights and the store windows, I shoot the same film rated at 1600 — that's a two-stop push, which means underexposing on purpose and then developing longer to make up for it — wide open at 1/60, and the grain gets big and beautiful. I mark the pushed rolls with a piece of tape so they don't get developed normally.

You'll be off by a stop sometimes. That's why it's Tri-X and not slide film. Over a few months of reading your own negatives against what you remember the light doing, you stop being off.

In this country you may photograph people in a public place. That's the law and it's a good law. It is not the same as a license to be a creep. My rules, arrived at by breaking each of them once:

1. Shoot first, then be a person. If they notice, I lower the camera, meet their eye, and nod or smile. Most people nod back. Hiding, turning away, pretending you were photographing the building — that's what makes people angry, because it tells them you think you did something wrong.
2. If they ask, tell the truth. "I photograph the city. You were in the light." Nine of ten are fine with it and the tenth is entitled to an explanation.
3. If they say don't, don't. And I mean don't take another one, not just apologize and keep going. I can't delete anything; it's film; the frame exists. What I can do is say so honestly — "it's on film, I can't undo it, but I won't print it" — and then not print it. I've offered a couple of times to send someone the print, and I've done it. Twice I've handed over the roll. That's the cost of doing business with people's faces, and it comes up maybe once a year.
4. Don't photograph misery for the thrill of it. A man asleep on a heating grate isn't your composition. If you can't say what the picture is about beyond "look at this," put the camera down. I've broken this one and the negatives are in a sleeve marked with an X and they'll stay there.
5. Kids: the parent is the subject. I don't photograph children unless a grown-up who belongs to them is in the frame or looking right at me, and if that grown-up wants to know what I'm doing, I stop and tell them.
6. Don't block the sidewalk, the door, the aisle, or the escalator. The city is not a set. Nobody is there for you.
7. On the El: no flash, no crouching, no lens six inches from a stranger's face at 7 a.m. People on a train can't leave. Be smaller than you'd be on the street.
8. Get out of the way of people working. Cops, paramedics, the guy unloading the truck. The picture is not worth being the reason something went wrong.

The general principle: you are taking something. Take it like a guest, not a thief.

Everything above, I got from looking at pictures. Go to the library, take out these, and look at every frame for a long time before you read the essays.

• Henri Cartier-Bresson. French, a rangefinder and a 50mm lens for most of his life, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency in 1947. His 1952 book was published in English as The Decisive Moment, and that phrase has been the name of the whole idea ever since: the instant when the shapes in the frame and the thing happening in it come together, and a half-second later it's gone. Look at how his frames are built — geometry first, then the person walks into it. He is still alive, in his nineties, and mostly draws now.
• Garry Winogrand. New York, wide lens, tilted frames, thousands and thousands of rolls, standing in the middle of everything with the camera at his eye and a grin. He died in 1984 and left a mountain of film he'd never developed, let alone printed. His pictures are crowded, loud and alive, and they taught me that the frame doesn't have to be tidy; it has to be full. Get the book of his zoo pictures, and the one of the press conferences and parties.
• Robert Frank. The Americans, shot on a cross-country trip in the mid-'50s and published here in 1959. Grainy, off-kilter, sad and true. When people say a picture looks "like Frank" they mean it was made by someone who wasn't trying to be liked.
• Walker Evans. In the late 1930s and early '40s he rode the New York subway with a camera hidden under his coat and photographed the people sitting across from him, not one of whom knew. The pictures came out as a book in the '60s. Every El picture I've ever made is a footnote to that.
• Helen Levitt. New York streets, kids playing, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, from the late '30s on. Tenderness without sentiment. Very hard to do.
• Harry Callahan. This one's ours. He taught at the Institute of Design here in Chicago from the late '40s into the '60s, and around 1950 he stood on State Street with a long lens and made close portraits of women walking toward him lost in their own thoughts. Same street, same light, fifty years later, and the faces are the same.

Notice that not one of them is famous for equipment. They're famous for standing in the right place and paying attention for thirty years.

Developing your own film is the other half of the hobby and it's cheap. A daylight tank, a changing bag to load it in, three chemicals, a thermometer, a clock. Tri-X at its normal speed goes in D-76 developer diluted one-to-one for about ten minutes at 68 degrees, agitating gently for the first thirty seconds and then a few seconds every minute; then a rinse, then fixer for five minutes, then a good wash, a drop of wetting agent, and hang it in the shower with a clip on the bottom. Pushed rolls (the night ones, rated 1600) get about twice the time. Dry by morning. Cut into strips of six, into a sleeve.

Then the contact sheet: the strips laid on a sheet of 8x10 paper under glass, exposed under the enlarger, developed, and there's your whole roll at actual size, thirty-six little frames, and you sit down with a magnifier and a grease pencil and circle the ones worth printing. Usually two or three. Sometimes none. The contact sheet is the most honest document in photography: every mistake is on it, in order, and it never lies about how many good ones you got.

Tri-X at 400, D-76 1:1, 10 minutes. Cloudy-bright morning turning to sun by noon. Brown Line in from the north side, around the Loop, State Street, Michigan Avenue, home on the Red Line. f/11 at 1/500 in the sun, f/8 at 1/250 in the shade and on the train, zone-focused at 12 feet unless noted. Frames marked * are circled in grease pencil.

Totals: 36 exposures, 5 circled, 2 I'll actually print full-size (5 and 35), one I'll print small for the flower girl's mother. Which is a good roll. A normal roll is two circles and one print. The rest is the price of the two.

Previous rolls: 99-40 (Labor Day, the lakefront, mostly people asleep on the grass, one keeper) and 99-39 (a rainy Thursday after work in the Loop, umbrellas from the hip, two keepers) will get written up when I've made the contact sheets. I'm three rolls behind, which is normal.

> elsewhere: The Darkroom Diary (the printing side, in more detail than I go into) · Charcoal & Coffee: A Sketchbook Online (drawing in public is the same problem with a pencil) · Watercolor Wednesdays (a retired teacher on looking before you make a mark) · Neon Nights: Old Signs of the Mother Road (a photographer who shoots signs, not people, and I understand why) · SoHo neighborhood

Frames counted since March 1999:  (visitors, actually. The frame count is higher.)

  [email protected] — if you shoot in Chicago, say so; there are four or five of us who walk on Saturdays and there's room. If you're the man in the fedora on State Street, I owe you a print.

Last updated September 25, 1999. © 1999 Marcus Greene. Text only; the negatives are in a shoebox and they're staying there.