a dogs eye view, my experience of street photography

My local photography/image club decided it was time for us to experience street photography, to try and capture moments of every day life. Now not knowing anything about street photography, I decided to read up on what street photography is all about.

Now apparently from what I read, you either need a shit load of confidence to go up to someone and ask 'Can I take your picture ?' and when they ask why DONT say its because you look a wierdo or slightly freakish. Try 'you look like a fascinating individual' or 'what an interesting face you have'

The other way of taking street photography is take it from a distance, to stand still in a place and let life and events happen around you. Not wishing to upset anybody and avoid getting get a good kicking, I decided to take the option of the more secretive style, observing from a distance.

Now bearing in mind I am not the most confident of people and standing in the middle of a city with a camera can be much like that dream you have where you walk around with no clothes on - so how the hell do I take a photo? After a lot of thought, I ended up taking inspiration from my dog. As I have watched her grow up, I see how she looks at the world, the angles and sees the things that I see everyday differently. I slipped my small camera up a wide coat sleeve and when I wanted to take the photo, I let the camera fall down into my hand and with some nifty finger work to switch it on, I could take the photo. I took them blind, no lining up or assessing the shot  - it was quite freeing actually.

I wandered around the city, firstly trying a few urban type shots to test out my technique.

Then as I got more confident and caught less, I angled the camera to give different views. Some gave some quite startling views, some gave some startled views (when they did this I tended to move away quickly)

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I then decided to sit on a bench on the market square and watch the world go by. I managed to take these ones even though an old man kept hitting me and the bench with his stick because he wanted to site down on the bench I was on, the empty bench next to me wasn't good enough apparently.

Whilst secretly taking photos was strangely exciting. I do think I made some people a bit nervous and may have been mistaken at times for the DHSS. I also felt slightly uncomfortable taking photographs of people without them noticing. What it did teach me though was to get a different perspective on life, see the world like a dog.

texture

We were asked to illustrate texture within a photograph, to find things in our surrounding environment. I decided to firstly look around my home for a number of differing items and differing definitions of the word texure.

I picked these shells because of their interesting form and surface. I used a mixture of natural and a small amount of artificial light to help pick out the texture on their surface and contrast it smooth finish of the surface they are laid on.

Noticing that smooth is also a texture, I wanted to try to show this in an interesting way. I chose two pieces of the same silk like material and scrunched them to give peaks and troughs. Using the same lighting as before, this gave contrasting areas of light and shade. The bold colours also give a texture

I then became slightly abstract in my thinking and considered that certain words give an image of texture in the mind. Word such as rough, smooth, sharp are words that can almost be felt. I wanted to try to illustrate this in a photograph and after a quick search around, I found some old drawing pins

The word pin is associated with the word sharp as well as the sharp end of the pin contrasting with the smooth background.

Venturing away from the more controlled environment of inside, I looked around my garden to find other examples of texture. May aim with this part of the task was to produce shots which show a different view of the obvious. This led me to look at the most boring elements in my garden, the house brick and the garden fence.

These shots are naturally lit with no flash. They have however been adjusted using photoshop elements to emphasise the texture on their surfaces and in the materials from which they are constructed

can't dance, can't sing, can't play music

I have always had a frustration at not having an outlet for my creativity but I have never found one. My dancing is at best as a unique style all of my own, my singing is best heard from a distance whilst wearing ear plugs and the only music I can play is three blind mice on the school recorder. The bind mice would also have benefited from being deaf.

Having decided to take up photography not to win competitions but to get the images i think I see out of my head and to make the viewer try and understand it and most of just bloody well enjoy it.

The aim in writing this blog is to write about what I try to, what I tried to do and what went wrong. I have read though a lot of photography blogs prior to starting this and they do show all the photographers best work which is fine, it absolutely brilliant. What they don't show is and what I am not afraid to show are the less than perfect photographs, the ones that went wrong and give comfort to anyone reading it that they are reading about a normal person

I hope you enjoy it