"I'm just a man hiding in the corner with a camera, watching."

So Alfred Hitchcock is reputed to have said. And I'm sure that many of us feel the same way when we hit the streets seeking candids.

That's something that I was only kinda sorta doing at this time. The E-M1 and I had been together for a month and a half by this point but I was still learning her moods, especially in strong, contrasty light. (And in Australia, isn't that almost all the time?) A trip to the annual Aroma Festival (of coffee and chocolate) seemed to provide plenty of fodder.

(Though it was a bad idea. The festival is a good idea in theory, less good in practice. There are few places to sit down and relax when you get some coffee and chocolates. Also to call the non-chocolate food stalls (the ones where you can get your actual lunch) "disorganised" would be killing them with kindness. The menus are unclear and sometimes entirely absent, the lines for ordering and paying for the food are ill defined, and the process for getting the food once you've paid for it are arcane. And again, there's nowhere to sit down and eat it when you do get it. During the week of the Aroma Festival there are several workshops on, but nothing on the weekend. I won't be in a rush to go back unless I'm in the city for another reason on that day.)

That's not the point.

This was not the best of my group shots but it had something that surprised me once I got the image into Bridge. The girls in the foreground, I was aware of. The woman serving, I was aware of. Several people on either side of the image and who have been cropped out, I was aware of. The woman who is being served, I was aware of.

The fact that another woman behind the counter was smiling at me and looking directly at me over the shoulder of the customer (and yes, she definitely was as in other frames I could see her moving her head around to lock onto me)... that I was not aware of.

So while we may sometimes think that we're hiding in the corner with our cameras... sometimes someone is watching us too. (Not that I minded at all in this case, even though I didn't know about it until I posted this shot almost 4 months later. Sometimes it works well as an "Easter egg".)

And as of November 13, that catches up with all of my PADs for July. August is still to go, plus some from September and October (though many of the September ones were posted closer to the time), and once I've done that I may yet round out the year shooting and processing my last few weeks pretty much on schedule.