Happy Halloween! 🎃
When you’ll read this I’ll be walking around the streets of Paris, getting some — much needed — time off.
Walking around, thinking, reflecting and taking pictures in the most romantic city of Europe. I hope you like this themed post about photography to give a taste of vacation to the regular retrospective format.
Takeaways (TL:DR)
As creative professionals, there are so many creative endeavours that we can experience outside of our daily jobs and routines. They can inspire us, get our creative juices flow and renew our passion towards the magical sensations of our creative jobs when we forget and give them for granted.
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Weekly retrospective
One month ago, ahead of an October full of traveling, I finally indulged in buying a camera. It was something I long postponed and I’ve been looking at street photography videos for months recently. So now I got this camera and some of you could have noticed it because I’ve been using galleries of my own pictures instead of AI generated images at the end a couple of posts.
My little Fuji X100F is light and small, is perfect to be taken everywhere, everyday, is so small and comfortable that I could use it solely as an outfit accessory. What’s more I’ve selected it among many digital cameras because it had some features that allow a complete beginner like me to have the shooting experience of film cameras without the waste of money I would gone through with buying and develop film.
Everything was selected with the priority of making as easy as possible to have the camera with me and have the time and the will to shoot as much and often as possible, in order to learn and build a practice with consistency. Does it sound familiar?
Anyway, in this first month using the camera I noticed some points that I would like to share.
Slowing down
I always liked to go out for a walk and observe, but taking a camera with you brings it to a whole new level. It’s meditative, it needs you to be present to your surroundings. The world around you moves really fast, you need to be ready to seize the moment to take your shoot, but you…slow…down. I you move fast you don’t have the time to notice things, to prepare, to work on the shot and your position, and wait for something to happen. This is one of the reasons I wanted to reproduce the experience of shooting on film.
I get to shoot with an optical viewfinder, so that I am looking directly at the real world while shooting and not filtered through a digital screen, in front of which I spend my entire week. I want to be present in the space. I shoot with the LCD screen always off, and whit small memory cards that allow me for less shots as if it was film. I look at photos only when I get back home. It forces me to slow down and think, be sure that every shot I take is worth it and is not wasting my time later to select the few good ones.
All of this brings me in a state of focus and meditation, and is a powerful tool to connect with the place I’m in and my own thoughts.
Change perspective
When I get out for a walk with the camera in places I’ve been a thousand times, there’s always something new to notice. I’m following different stimuli than the usual ones. I’m pushed to observe more and this brings me towards rediscover places again and again every time there’s a different light or different people.
It’s an incredible mechanism for a curious mind. A great motivation to explore and find something new. And it is a great practice to slow down and rewatch things, go through the same place again and again in search of a new perspective and a new detail to notice and reframe the entire thing. You can apply the same process in any other activity, and is great to work and life as well.
Interact
Doing street photography forces you to interact with people and places in ways different from how yo usually would. Especially for an introverted person like me, it pushes me to move around the space, to interact with people that see you taking pictures of them, and also with those who won’t notice. In this case the camera I’ve chosen give a little help as well. It has a fixed focal lens that cannot zoom and for this reason I’m forced to move with my body to make the composition of the shot.
It really changes the way I interact with the world while I’m out shooting, and creates situations where I need to overcome my social fears and anxieties, making me grow in some other different ways and leading me towards places I wouldn’t naturally find otherwise.
Mindset and intention
I see that going out shooting pictures is a moment of complete mind shift. Because I’m a beginner and nothing comes naturally yet, I’m focused and I try to notice things that I usually ignore.
For example how the light is hitting things. What people are doing, which colours they are wearing. I try to understand which is their story and see if can create one with the surroundings. I began to look at reflecting surfaces to add textures, especially shop windows to mix what is inside with the reflection of what’s outside. I look at architecture searching for lines driving the attention towards a particular detail. I look for things that I can use to frame my subjects and hide to view of something distracting that I don’t want in the picture.
There are so many things that I keep in mind for photography that I usually don’t, and they bring me much curiosity, they put me in a state of mind where there’s no space for many more thoughts. As I wrote before, it meditative in some way and it makes time flow. It creates the perfect context and situation to spend time with myself and be present with intention and a curious mind.
If you like these selection of photo, you can follow my new project PhotoBA on instagram where I share my street photography pictures.
If you liked this post and you think some of your friends would like it as well, please share it with whoever you like.
Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia