Last week in Dublin a major engineering project was finished. The “Luas” cross-city tram project was finally completed. When the tram network was originally built there were two lines, which severed different parts of the city, but they weren’t connected, and there was no way to cross the city on the tram. Recently the city undertook a major civil engineering project to join the two lines. Over the past four years, I've been documenting the construction progress.

For a while now, I’ve been running a series of posts here on this blog called “Street Photo Diary”. I’ve also been practicing and testing various setups to allow me to produce “Vlog” style videos. After much testing and messing up, I have finally come up with a reasonable setup and idea, and that is to make a video version of my “Street Photo Diary” series. And so, a new monthly (for now) video series is born, also called “Street Photo Diary” !

Sometimes I just like to go for a walk with my camera, without intent or purpose. Just to see what one can see. This was one of those days. I set out with my Sony A6000 and Sigma 30mm lens. I didn’t really have any goals in mind. I just wanted to go for a walk and hopefully find some nice images.

Last week I posted the latest issue of my on-going Street Photo Diary series to my PhotoJournal blog. I had taken those shots in a single session and I felt that they worked well together as a set, however, I have a few more images that I took recently too. They didn’t really fit into the narrative that I was going with, so I thought that I would share them here in a separate post, with a bit more info on how I shot them. 

I’ve said on my blog many times that Autumn is my favourite time of the year for photography. This isn’t just about the wonderful colours of the falling leaves. It’s also abut the Autumn light, and here in Ireland it’s already starting to be noticeable. In this issue of my on-going street photo diary series, I look at images shot on a sunny Autumn day in Dublin city, taken with a Fuji X-Pro 2 and  18-55mm lens.

I recently headed out to shoot some street photography on film, for my Street Photo Diary project, and I decided that it might make an interesting video. So, before I got started, I mounted my trusty GoPro on my cameras hot shoe, set it recording, and headed out onto the streets of Dublin to get some shots.

It’s been little while since I’ve posted a Street Photo Diary, and for this issue, I’m doing things a little differently. I’ve been shooting some film recently, and I also found some undeveloped film that I shot back at the start of the year, which also turned out to be some street shots. 

With all the fuss recently about the Sony A9 and its electronic shutter, I thought I would try out the one on my X-Pro 2. I had dabbled with it before, but I always thought it was a bit of an odd experience, so I didn’t really do much with it. I had also read various reports of it introducing rolling shutter effects, so I hadn’t payed it much attention. However, I was out doing some street photography the other day, and so I thought that I might as well give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised.

A few weeks ago, I was up and out early into the city to shoot some things for my Streets of Dublin project, and while I was there I ended up shooting a lot of street photography too. What was funny though was that, as it was early in the morning, people were heading to work and the mood was quite different from how it is later in the day. For a start everyone was walking with haste and with a real sense of purpose.

It’s been another month, and so it’s time for another issue of my Street Photo Diary series. Every time I do one of these I always end up having difficulty coming up with an intro for the piece. Having just watch “The Big Bang Theory” and Sheldon’s “Fun With Flags, behind the flag, a retrospective” I’m tempted to do a humorous take on that, but instead, something else occurred to me.

The other day I was sitting in the window at one of my regular Starbucks pit-stops, and I was trying to write some content for my blog, but I was struck by a bad case of writers block. I was sitting there staring out the window hoping for creativity, and then I began playing with my camera while I sipped my coffee.

Every year, at this time, the city of Dublin get’s a little greener. I’m not talking about some environmental initiative though. It’s not a sudden growth of trees or grass either. No, instead I’m talking about the annual build up to St. Patricks Day. Where every shop, pub and restaurant does it’s patriotic duty and adorns their premises in the requisite amount of green trappings, from Shamrocks to Leprechauns. If you didn’t know what was going on you’d think there was some kind of plastic outbreak.

I wanted to wrap up the street photography video series I’ve been sharing over the past few days with one final post, where you can see the finished images. These are some of the actual images the I edited in the second part of the video, as well as a few more that I didn’t cover. 

I really want to start doing more video and in particular I want to do a series of vlog style videos. I’ve been putting it off out of fear, and general procrastination, but yesterday I finally got around to making my first attempt. I won’t call it a resounding success because a lot of things didn’t exactly go according to plan, but it turned out reasonably well all things considered. I consider this as a learning exercise. A beta version if you will.

Welcome to the first edition of Street Photo Diary for 2017. Considering I’ve been doing about one of these a month that means I’ve been doing the Street Photo Diary series for about 2 years now. For the new year, I’m going to try and keep to that schedule, so here’s the first instalment, for January!