how one can frame a certain site are exactly what makes photography so fascinating. For not only does it take inspiration to find your way of framing it. It is also—as you mentioned—a highly emotional process. I love this intensive moment of approaching a scene with my camera and, by walking around and looking at it from different angles, starting to understand what I see. And then it happens that I look through the viewfinder and say to myself, "this is it, this is my understanding of the scene", and I pull the trigger. What a rewarding and liberating moment. Each photograph is a bit like unraveling a mystery.
I appreciated your questions which I would like to answer as follows:
1. If this one was taken with the 1.2 50mm, what and why the choice of aperture?
You were right, this shot was taken with my 50/1.2. As I wrote in my reply to Echi it took me some time to find out which would be the best depth of field for this picture as I wanted to blur the background only as much as to make a clear difference with the foreground and at the same time reveal the structure and the shapes of the demolished building in the background. In the end I chose ƒ2.2 which I found would best achieve this desired effect. The building was approximately 10 metres away and the crushed metal was about half a metre away from my lens.
2. You never seem to try black and white (although this one is almost b&W), any reason?
I love b&w photography and some of my b&w shots belong to my personal favourites. Yet I have recently enjoyed shooting pale scenes, that is shooting the sites under certain lighting conditions. So, in contrast to what most photographers regard as perfect shooting conditions I have become quite addicted to cloudy, rather greyish days. I find that the resulting, lowly saturated pictures match best my perception of my typical subject matters. In a way, it's a bit like twilight: you have the best of both daylight and night. So with these lowly saturated images I (sometimes) aim at the expressiveness of b&w photography and still have an allusion of colours which for example here in this shot were quite essential for me, too.
