Perhaps the greatest barrier to effective street photography is the mess that crowds can make out of a picture. Street crowds will invariably fragment composition, pulling the eye all over the place, and diluting any meaning that individual people might project. Street photographers must find ways to neutralize the cluttering effect that crowds bring to pictures. One way, of course, is to move in and isolate the actions and interactions of particular people within the crowd. Another way to “clean up” clutter in crowd scenes is to somehow use abstraction to simplify the image and give the crowd a sense of unity instead of fragmentation. This is what I do in this photograph of street crowd surging along a Dublin street. I abstract the scene by taking a vantage point shooting into the sun, instead of shooting with the sun behind me. Using my spot meter, I exposed for the pavement. If I did not use the spot meter, the camera might well have severely over-exposed the sidewalk, creating glare and spoiling the picture. By using the spot meter on the brightest part of the picture, everything else gets darker. This under-exposed crowd of people becomes a massive series of silhouettes. Some leave their shadows behind them, others chase shadows, and even shadows chase shadows. The image becomes nightmarish, a surrealistic abstraction symbolizing toil and struggle. I shot this particular scene over and over until enough space opened up in the crowd to allow the shadows to cleanly fall into place. In fact, I was so conscious of play of the shadows in this picture that I focused on them, and not on the people. (See my comments regarding this point under my picture “Shadow Play, St. Malo” elsewhere in this gallery.)