Next day early morning we took an auto rickshaw to the city centre. Suddenly he was a different person. While we passed through the narrow streets into alley ways, and from bazaars into crowded markets, he made himself as inconspicuous as possible, the entire time shooting pictures. He carried no shoulder-bags so that he could move very freely in the crowded areas. He never wore his camera around his neck like most photographers do. Instead, if he was not taking pictures even for a short period of time, he covered his little Leica with a handkerchief and kept walking and looking for interesting situations to photograph. Once he noticed something he liked, he disappeared so fast I had to look for him. Just when I locked on to him, he was gone again. He walked so fast that by the time someone knew that they had been photographed, he was gone.
Very rarely did he take pictures in bright sun light, instead he preferred to take pictures in either reflected light or shaded areas to avoid sharp contrasts and to capture all the details, textures and fine grey tones. For this reason he almost always used Kodak Tri-X (400ASA) film. Almost every half hour I passed him a cassette of fresh film and made notes for the exposed cassette which he had just handed to me. I was glad that I did not bring my camera with me that first day. I was happy to observe him in action. There was a lot to learn.
I couldn’t believe how simple his Leica was. The Leica body had no rewinding leaver. To advance the film he had to manually turn the little round knob twice on the camera. There was no focusing ring on the lens either. He had to judge the distance himself and choose the setting on the lens, while capturing his famous “decisive moments” in crowded places. Later on he explained to me that this was all done by choice. Over the years he had simplified the technical part of photography to suit his unobtrusive shooting style and still create a technically perfect photograph. For instance, he judged the light by eye, although he carried a small light meter in his pants pocket. Since he mostly shot in shaded areas he set his F stop at 5.6 or 8 and shutter speed at 1/60th to 1/125th of a second, so he could quickly pay attention to his subject matter. He made it clear that, “technique is not so important to me, but people and their activities are”. He said, “Think about the photograph before and after, but not during. The secret is to take your time but also to be very quick”. In other words there was to be no cropping of the image later, no dodging or other tricks used in printing. The image captured on film had to stand on its own merits.
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