The first day of school by Bogo Pečnikar

On September 1st I made an urban photo walk in our pretty little town.

I was lucky to hit one of the streets, popular with youngsters, just about the time when the first school day was over.

There was a joyful excitement in the air. The busy street was full of youngsters, some of them mostly girls with weirdly scribbled faces. Here there is this habit among the high-school students, to scribble the faces and exposed body parts of the newbies, mostly with the letter “F” as for “fazan” (pheasant). Not a completely harmless habit, since they were using regular permanent markers. Hard to wash out, but won’t even last until the first tattoos, piercings and alike.

While the majority of work has obviously been done back in schools, some of them were still chasing each other with markers in their hands…well it was mostly boys chasing girls, but they didn’t seem to oppose very much, I’ve seen a group of girls having a scribble sense behind a corner (who would like to be the least scribbled girl on entire high school-or the one, who didn’t do their artwork on a college’s face).
Being presented with such a photo opportunity, the street photographer in me wanted to take immediate action. Did a few shots. However I’m much too slow with my cane, to chase them around, so I decided to continue with my slowish tempo scanning the scene from far. Having a wide-angle 21 mm prime pancake lens on my Pentax crop DSLR, I had to get pretty close to fill the frame, in verbal communication distance, anyway.

Lots of “zooming with feet” which, again isn’t my forte so I had to compensate with my experience and prediction by scanning the scene from far and picking my subjects in advance to reach them with my snail tempo and then take advantage of my self-confidence and feeling comfortable with getting with my camera into people’s faces. The above mentioned verbal communication helped a lot besides, the subjects rather liked being photographed. Also, the street has a slight downward inclination which helped me to keep the tempo with the crowd. Anyway, I thought I’ve deserved the macchiato I had later in a café near the river.