Photographing out in the world. Is it "one perfect shot" and then move on? Or is it "catch the developing action" and select the right frame after the fact?

Sitting at a restaurant just across the small square from the Pantheon in Rome. B. and I had been walking through the eternal city for days. I was carrying a Hasselblad 500CM; a film camera, along with its heavy 100mm f3.5 Planar lens. I wanted a cool drink so we stopped near the Pantheon. In fact, right across the plaza from it. Our plan was to drink something cool and refreshing and then stroll into the uncrowded, centuries old building to look around. 

The couple in these four photographs were sitting right in front of us and having an animated conversation. I focused, wet my index finger and held it up in the air to estimate the right exposure and then shot a frame, waited for the animation and expressions to change, shot another frame, etc. etc.

If the couple knew I was making photographs they certainly didn't acknowledge it. I'll assume that they assumed I was naturally interested in the Pantheon; if they noticed at all. There are more exposures than the ones that I'm showing but the one just above has been in our entry foyer from the day we moved into our house 28 years ago. It's one of my favorite images. Especially as a hand-printed, 20x20 inch print on double weight paper, matted and framed.

I came across this series again as I was practicing scanning old film negatives. I have a binder with about 160 rolls of 120mm film negatives, coupled with contact sheets. I've been going through them for a while each day to see what I thought looked like a good candidate to print at the time and then how my taste may have changed some thirty years later. 

With digital I would go ahead and process everything I shot that might even vaguely be a potentially fun photograph. But back in the film era one had to be much more conservative. A sniper of editing as opposed to a machine gun approach to selecting frames. Each frame, printed represented hours of time and lots of effort in the darkroom. Not to mention the cost of multiple sheets of big printing paper --- which even then was not cheap. That meant finding the "best" image from a series and focusing one's energy on that project. Looking for complete "bangers" instead of working up multiple, possible candidates. 

Digital imaging changes the thought process; at least for me. I'll go out on an afternoon and shoot 200 frames. If I find something I really like I'll try various compositions and distances from camera to the subject. If it's an interesting person I'll work with them by shooting multiple frames as I try to get a range of expressions and gestures. I've often found, after the fact, that I've just shot a couple dozen images of someone I just met in order to get the two or three frames I like. I would have never done that while doing travel photography for myself. If there had been a client project involved but for a casual trip with my spouse? Probably never than five or six medium format film frames. 

I have no idea what the couple was discussing. My take, when I see the age difference and the fact that in the last frame the young woman on the right is wearing braces on her teeth, is that this is a father and a daughter who've met to talk about school or family. Or they themselves are visitors. There's no rule that Italian native speakers can't be tourists as well...

Looking through the big binder makes me remember how much fun it was to shoot with a camera that introduced so much friction into the process of making images. Getting keepers seemed like so much bigger victories. My favorites from this series are the top image because it looks more serious and the arm adds so much sense of connection, and the last image because it encapsulates joy. Yours?