Soundslikewish

Street photography: second best shots this year

This year I’ve been practising photography with the very helpful box of prompts by David Gibson, Street Photography Challenge, with some extra hints from a small book called Hot Shots by Kevin Meredith, and from web sites about black and white street photography. Now in December I’m admitting that some of Gibson’s suggestions are just not doable in my world, for example “photograph a scene reflected in a wet street”, which is difficult in the dry place where I live. Then there are others I’ve attempted a number of times and failed miserably, like “find a line that continues across something else”.

So I’m drawing a line under this project.

However, there are many photos I’ve taken this year in pursuit of the prompts, and while I’ve published my individual favourites on this blog, a few others tell a story, and I think they are worth looking at. As an end-of-year time-filler, I’ll post them here.

The first pictures are responses to David Gibson’s prompts.

Feet:

Mannequins:

Moving subject:

Someone having their picture taken:

Another picture of someone having their picture taken:

From above:

Upside down:

Someone looking into my lens:

The following shot is inspired by a prompt in Hot Shots by Kevin Meredith.

Contrast:

The next shot is inspired by a web site prompt, https://digital-photography-school.com: “Capture birds as they clean up crumbs left on an outdoor cafe table.

Local animals:

Lastly, photograph the sky:

This is a prompt in Gibson’s Street Photography Challenge box that I struggled to understand. How could it be a street photography prompt? Yet I’m quite satisfied with my result. With the tops of buildings and the silhouette of a street lamp, it’s still clearly a street photo. Gibson suggests bringing in an architectural form or part of a landmark; so I might be successful for having captured at least one recognisable symbol.

Happy 2024 to all of you who have read my posts this year. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this street photography experiment.

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Street photography: contrast in colour

When you’re visiting somewhere new, look out for the small details, says Hot Shots author Kevin Meredith.

I was in Melbourne recently, walking on a busy street in the mid-afternoon, when I saw before me the legs of this little schoolgirl passing those of an elegant woman. I reflected on the different stages of a girl’s life, when she’s a child and has to wear black school shoes and short white socks, and being set free as an adult when she can draw attention to her legs with black floral stockings and red shoes.

With my camera held low I snapped a picture, and am quite pleased with the image and its example of contrast.

Street photography: Unconventional Filter

In his Street Photography Challenge box, David Gibson recommends placing different kinds of filter in front of the lens, such as clear plastic wrap. One day I spotted my toddler grandson looking through a coaster with a cut-out pattern, and I instantly knew what I could use for a filter. Here’s the coaster:

And here’s a pic I took with one hand holding the coaster in front of the camera and the other clicking the shutter. I happened to catch these two women in one of the cut-outs. Pretty pleased.

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Street photography: Graphic shapes

I saw the shadow of this painter and thought of David Gibson’s suggestion to photograph graphic shapes. In his Street Photography Challenge box he has a prompt card to find dog shapes specifically, but I’m struggling to photograph any dogs that stand still long enough for me to catch the best, most graphic, shadow.

It was quite odd seeing this man’s shadow on the wall when I was walking in the street. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dark shape. He was actually moving along on a cherry picker, and I couldn’t see the painter himself who by this point was behind the bush. He had finished painting the eaves on this wall and was rolling back down to the other end.

I’m surprised how much more interesting life has become since I’ve begun looking for potential black and white photos.

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Street photography: Contrast in black and white

This week I was inspired by a suggestion in the Hot Shots book by Kevin Meredith to photograph contrasting things in one shot. But I’m taking the idea down a different path and comparing my street photo taken yesterday in Canberra with my father’s street photo from 1941 in Cairo, contrasting trams then and now, in two very different capital cities.

Heliopolis Cairo Tram 1941

Canberra tram 2023

Though there’s obvious contrast, there are similarities. I like the curving tracks in both photos. And the overhead electrical wires with the fine patterns they form against the sky. And there are cars on the road in both images. Apart from the ages of the pictures, the greatest contrast is in the buildings. The neo-Islamic architecture in the old photo is far more appealing than the archive building in mine, which I snapped as the tram passed through an industrial suburb. The building in the old photo was created as part of a shopping and café block for the wealthy in Heliopolis, which was then an outer Cairo suburb developed in 1910 as an oasis in the desert. The tram system was added to enable people to travel in to the centre of Cairo. My father captioned this photo “electric trains”, a term closer to “Metro” which was used by the Egyptians at the time. The Heliopolis tram system is now a thing of the past.

The old tram tracks in Heliopolis were removed in 2014, and the new Canberra tracks were laid down in 2018.

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Street photography: Patterns on a window

A window whitewashed to hide renovations taking place inside a shop would be a gift to a street photographer, suggests David Gibson in his Street Photography Challenge box. But how about a graffiti artist illegally spraying a nice clean shop mirror with black paint in a busy city street?

Gibson says he sees patterns in dabs of colour on painted windows. I suspect there is a pattern in this graffiti artist’s “work” though I have no idea what it is or what the words say. Several people stopped and watched but none called him out. Most of us would have been afraid he’d turn the spray can on us if we intervened. For my part I was busy taking the photo… One man, however, didn’t hesitate to approach the artist from behind and spoke quietly in his ear. His hi-vis vest said he was from a graffiti removal team. The artist left immediately but no doubt had some paint left in his can for the next mirror or window.

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Street photography: Faceless portrait

In past weeks I’ve been using prompts from a Street Photography Challenge box while also reading a book called Hot Shots by Kevin Meredith which gives excellent hints for street photography (among other forms).

One of Meredith’s ideas is to make a faceless portrait, and I think this shot fits the bill. It does show a fraction of a woman’s face but the portrait is painted more in the detail: the way she is reclining and reading her books, the angle of her leg on the left half of the photo, leaving a lot of empty space in contrast to the right side filled with her upper half, a cluttered pram full of her worldly possessions, and her dog. We can know a lot about her without knowing her face.

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Street photography: Couple

Two people, so comfortable in each other’s company that they often behave as one, even in the street, can be “nearly oblivious to outsiders,” says David Gibson on his prompt card from the Street Photography Challenge box. For this challenge I photographed several couples, young and old, all of them clearly in love, or still in love after many years. The photo I’ve chosen for today is of a couple in a busy part of town who struck me as enjoying each other so much that they were indeed oblivious to all of us passers-by. I was leaning against a café watching them for a minute or two when I realised they would make a good subject, as if posing for this challenge!

Soon after this moment they went their separate ways. Perhaps they were relishing the last moments together until they could meet again.

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Street photography: Frame

I recently pulled a card from the Street Photography Challenge box by David Gibson that asked me to look for a framing structure and fill it. I found the ideal frame in a Chinatown kind of area of the city. It was a quiet day, good for catching a few individual people passing by these black marble frames which have recently been erected to replace some poor quality street decorations. The marble captured my reflection on the right side of the image.

This challenge gave me another way to create a framed photo!

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Street photography: Someone walking

A group of motorcyclists were standing outside a café in Braidwood on Saturday morning, their black leather Veterans bike jackets drawing my attention, reminding me of the anniversary of the previous day, 18th August, the 50th anniversary of the end of Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. I’m guessing these men were riding together to commemorate it.

They were preparing to mount their bikes and ride away when I noticed one of them striding towards his mates. In the same moment a pedestrian was walking slowly past, enjoying the spectacle of the group, holding a piece of paper over his head against the sun. The contrast of the two walkers reminded me of a prompt in the Street Photography Challenge box by David Gibson, to photograph someone walking. “The way people walk often seems to tell you something about them,” he says.

The striding man walks straight-legged, tough, confident, temporarily owning the space. The other man with his impromptu sunshade saunters slowly, both legs bent, passing the Veterans with interest, aware that they deserve respect.

I had set my camera to black and white, knowing that the black jackets and bikes would produce interesting shots without colour. A couple of the Veterans spotted me snapping photos of them and looked straight into my camera lens. The resulting pictures make a great story, but this is the only one to suit the “someone walking” prompt.

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