Mick Davidson

When I look through the viewfinder there are 1000s of conscious and sub-conscious influences controlling what goes in and what gets left out of a photo. For some time now I have been trying to remove my subjective thinking when taking pictures.

To do this I set the camera either on fully auto or I set the shutter speed and everything else is on auto. I hold the camera at waist level so that I cannot see through the viewfinder and also to make sure that people are unaware they are being photographed.

I would be the first to admit that the pics are not always successful: in fact there is nearly always some blurring or over/under-exposure. This is to be expected, even welcomed. Because I am not looking, all I can do is point the camera in the general direction of what I see and hope that something will come of it. Mostly what I get back is unusable, but sometimes a combination of people or actions that I hadn't noticed are captured.

Most of what I consider to be successful comes from a chance arrangement of people, actions and expressions. However I like to crop scenes into existence as well. Which means that, more often than not, if someone is only half in the picture it's because I've put them there. In fact, apart from some balancing of over and under-exposure, cropping is my main tool.

These photos are some of the more successful attempts at taking pictures that have minimal influence from me.