Small, fast cameras. Bigger is not better.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to spend the rest of your days walking through the streets of exciting cities and taking images of whatever caught your eye?  Sucks living in a car city.  Maybe that's why I like roaming streets crowded with pedestrians in other cities.  Here in Austin most of us live in "neighborhoods" or suburbs.  More people are moving into downtown but the street culture is very nascent.  I can hardly wait for it to catch up.  I do my part.  I head into downtown whenever I can and I patronize the cool little restaurants and bars that are starting to spill out to the sidewalks.

The photo above was taken in Paris with a small Nikon 35ti film camera and some Tri-X.  The camera fit in my hand and never had a strap.  It was easy to prefocus, the fixed 35mm lens meant that I had no decisions to make about lenses.  I could set a manual exposure and argue with the camera later when I went into the dark room.  I KNOW it is faster to use in this way than ANY autofocus DSLR with any zoom lens on the front.  And I know that the time spent in doing the process with a slower camera would change the dynamic.  I'm not concerned when shooting in the street that someone will be angry or will keep me from working.  I'm only concerned that the thing I saw, the emotion I wanted to capture, not be changed by people's realization of my presence, my intention or any other controllable parameter.

Everyone believes that their reality is the "real" one.  Except the Jedi Knights.  They knew that your focus determines your reality.   And my focus is locked at ten feet.

A more intimate image taken with a Canonet QL17 and tri-x.

Final word on the small cameras.  You will more likely carry a small camera that intrudes less on you.  And when you have it with you then you'll have more and more opportunities to connect with the things that tickle your subconscious.