How to tell if you are eating with a “street photographer.” As you enter the restaurant, there’s a scoping out of the seat with the best view. If the two of you are friends, you’ll be able to say something like, “c’mon, you had the good seat last time.”
There is no way of really knowing what the best seat is going to be, but the possibilities are always swirling around your brain. You may be talking, or laughing or just wondering about who’s going to pay the bill; but instinctively, you will move to where you think you’ve got the best possibilities. In this case, either side of the booth would have been okay. I placed the camera on the edge of the camera, feeling that I didn’t want to attract too much attention; and waited for the so-called moment… in this case it was just a moment of engaging banter between the two women. Click. And now you can concentrate on your own breakfast or the Mets, or whatever you were talking about with a feeling that you may have caught something. Thinking over the backlighting, and the shutter speed. In the film days it would be a while before you knew for sure if you got something.
The tiny plastic orange juice glass is part of the so-called breakfast special. Not a very good diner, but it’s still around twenty years later.
What a beautiful photograph. Reminds me of a diner in Boston that my grandmother used to take me to when I was young and smoking was still allowed in restaurants there. I can just smell the bacon and cigarette smoke.