Since coming back to Barcelona I've been taking street photography more and more seriously. Not seriously as in "this is a serious thing" but seriously as in "I really like doing this and I'm going to take my camera with me everywhere".
It's been fun exploring around and lately I've found that whenever I don't take my camera with me I really end up regretting it, because I always see something really cool. I'm seeing life all around me and after living in small towns, and quiet Canadian cities for the past few years being in the bustling, busy and hectic city of Barcelona is like being surrounded by life. There is always something happening, always some moment or bit of light. I really enjoy capturing all these little moments of life happening around me.
It was pouring rain this day, I went down to the beach to meet my wife and some friends who had gone paddle boarding in the morning.
We took the bus home that day. I find that public transit is a really great place for street photography. Lots of people just going about their lives, trying to get from one place to the other. I think people in transit have a special look to them, like people in an airport, everybody is trying to get somewhere for whatever their own reasons are. There is a lot of real human emotion on display, frustration, anxiety, excitement, sadness, resignation, boredom, sadness, you see a lot of these things when you're travelling around other people.
I often find myself trying to capture people in motion. I don't know why, I just see something and I like the way it looks, and I try to capture that memory. I suppose it might help my success rate if I used a better camera with faster autofocus but you work around your limitations. I think using specific gear to obtain specific results can add a real defining characteristic to your images as well. I shoot all of these images with a (now) relatively old Fuji X - T2. It's funny to think that this is now quite an old camera, at the time of its release it was incredibly popular, it probably still is to be honest, but it's been replaced four times over with newer and more advanced models. I use the now famous Fuji 35mm f1.4 lens, and I've got the square lens hood which I adore just because it looks so damn cool. It really "looks" like a street photographer's camera. Maybe that helps me get into the idea of being a street photographer.
These are some of my favourite type of shots to capture, I don't know why but I always seem to seek out single subjects. Or I try to isolate my subject totally at least. Maybe there is some psychological thing going on there, or maybe I just like the way that it gives you only one thing to focus on. I guess it makes composition a little easier because it's immediately evident what the focus of the image is, maybe I'm lazy that way. I feel like I killed it this day though, the light was gorgeous here and I got a few shots that I really love.
I've been watching a lot of videos on youtube about street photography and it's making me think of it in different ways. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that, I've always just done my own thing in photography and I feel like I have a decent instinct for it. Many years ago I had a friend who was going to university for photography, whenever we hung out together we always ended up just doing some kind of artistic thing. I told her I was thinking of doing some photography classes like her and she strongly encouraged me not to. She said that what she loved about my photography was that I didn't play by any of the "rules" because I didn't really know them. I just went and did whatever I wanted and tried to make something beautiful. Going to university had changed her whole perspective about photography from a free form artistic endeavour to something that had rules and boundaries she felt she had to follow. I took her advice and a few years later I was working as a professional photographer living my dream. I learned most of what I needed to know by taking tens of thousands of photos, the rest was filled in with google and youtube and talking with other photographers.
It's amazing to me that I can explore photography in deeper ways, have access to advanced gear and continually hone my skills, or learn new ones. I'm glad I listened to my friend and instead of being instructed in the "proper" way to be a photographer I just kept picking up my camera and exploring.
I guess that's all for today. My wife has been sick and we are in the middle of starting to redo our entire website which is a huge undertaking I'm not looking forward to. Now I'm sick too and ironically that has given me time to sit in bed and write a post on Hive. It's so good to be back here, to have a place to put photos I'm proud of and write down my thoughts, I'm enjoying it immensely.
Thanks so much for reading all this way, I hope you like the photos! Feel free to follow me @dexter-k on Hive to see more of my street photography, travels, and some professional work too.
As usual I'm going to set payout on this post to liquid using reward.app. I'm gearing up to get in on the Alpha sale of @holozing, which means I'll be reinvesting all profits directly back into the Hive ecosystem. If you haven't heard of Holozing yet you can see what it's all about by following the community here: https://peakd.com/c/hive-131131/trending. There have been some exciting new releases recently and the game seems to be well on it's way!
