New gear comes with a use obligation or pangs of conscience as the case may be. Even if you spent the princely sum of £120… it’s the principle that matters. So here we are, Fuji XT-20+27mm pancake lens in the streets of Cambridge. One hour, that was the challenge.

Bear with me and carry on reading on a large screen if you have one to hand.

For those who don’t know much about Cambridge (do you even exist?) it is a city of colleges, like this:

where people ride bicycles, like these:

and spend their lives musing over questions that the sciences and humanities have posed to mankind, like this:

Street photography requires invisibility. Easily achieved: shutter goes into silent mode, camera held with both hands, thumbs on top, pressed against one’s stomach (never mind flat or not), right thumb on trigger. Aim blind, look down or away and hold your breath when releasing (helps to minimise the shake). Not a single soul will guess what you are doing. I stood barely a metre away from my subjects and they were perfectly unaware. The shutter sound is not exactly “silent”, but very quiet and uncharacteristic. Apparently people think that a thumb is unusable with the shutter release button, so if you thumb it — you are not shooting. A camera does not shoot, they think, if you don’t hold it up, either to your face or in outstretched arms. But it does.

The lag for a Fuji is 20ms, the shortest I’ve ever experienced, so you can also time it well… None of the subjects below knew she was being photographed. Or he. Ditto for the title image. Honest! Naturally the trick does not work with a mobile phone, hence the outlay for the gear, alas…

And now to kids, who are always photogenic and who never need a caption

And finally, the Midsummer Chronophage or the future Prime Minister:

Fare thee well, Cambridge!