Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Street
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!
Christmas is nearly here, and I wanted to finish off the year with one more Street Photo diary post. I’ve enjoyed doing this series, and I hope to do more of it next year, but I thought a Christmas themed edition would be somewhat appropriate.
Last weekend here in Dublin, there was a special Christmas edition of the monthly Dublin flea market, and I went along with my camera (of course) to check it out. It wasn’t exactly a typical Christmas market, more of a special extra large version of the normal market for Christmas.
I’ve been travelling for the last few days, and I’m in Brussels, in Belgium. I’ve been here quite a few times and I know my way around quite well now. I usually photograph the sights and the buildings, but this time, as I was only here for a short trip, I spent my photo taking opportunity shooting street photography instead.
Autumn is slowly giving way to winter here in Dublin city, and as the seasons change the light changes too. The harsh winter sun brings with it long shadows and cool sunshine. I actually love the light this time of year, and for street photography it makes for an interesting subject all of its own.
Street photography seems to be a topic that stirs a lot of emotion in people. Some, understandably passionate photographers seem to think that street photography is a sort of religion, with strict rules for devout followers. Those who deviate from the faith are deemed not to be true believers and exiled by the keepers of various internet blogs for fear of corrupting the pure ideology of the religion. Personally, I shoot it because I enjoy it, and I don’t really take it that seriously. I do find some of the discussions somewhat amusing though.
After a topsy turvy weather ride this year, we finally had a few nice and sunny days here in Dublin, and I made sure to make the best of them. I managed to spend a good bit of time out shooting some street shots and I finally feel that my mojo is starting to come back a little.
A few years ago my wife and I spent a few weeks in New York and Washington DC. I had a great time there and I took the time to get lots of photos. While I’ve posted many from the trip int he past, I was generally focussing on the more “Travel” kind of photos. Recently I was going back over these images and I realised that I have shots from the trip that would fall into the “Street” genre.
As I mentioned on my main blog recently, I've been scanning in lots of my old negatives and slide film recently. One of the patterns that's emerged from looking at my old shots is that I had an interest in Street Photography even from the early days of my photographic interests. Of course I didn't know it was a genre called "Street Photograhy" at the time. I just like taking pictures around the city. Most of these were taken between 15-20 years ago, on my trusty Canon Eos 5.
Summer has come to Ireland, and unusually we're having a prolonged spell of good weather. The up side of that, for the photographer is that with it comes some really nice light, at least if you know where to look. The other advantage, well for me anyway, is that it makes me get out. I fond it hard to look outside and see the beautiful sunshine, and not take my camera and go outside.
It's been a while since I've done one of these Street Photo diary posts. The last one was in March and it's now may. I haven't been doing as much street photography as I would like lately. For one, I was focussing on some writing, and getting my Iridient Developer book out. Secondly, because of all the lovely nature blooming around the city and the surrounding areas, I've been doing a lot more nature photography. I finally took my camera back to the streets recently though, and set about capturing the life around me.
I never know how to start these Street Photo diary posts. Should I come up with some philosophical observation on the society that I'm documenting? Should I talk about the gear that I used? Should I wax lyrical about the importance of this or that photographic ideology? I just don't know. At the end of the day, much of the images that I take for these street photo diary series are shots I took for me, because I like some aspect of the scene, or I see a story unfolding that looks like it could be interesting.
