Game On

"Is my light on?" - me at 13,500 feet before every jump when I was a former skydiver and videographer

Ok - with my unboxed A6300 in hand, I’m now more than ever interested in photo-blogging and street photography.  This is really born out of my latest appreciation for art - photography to be specific.  I’ve been following food, plating, coffee, and travel feeds on Instagram and many of you know that I’ve attempted my own little DoF/Bokehlicious pics of favorite coffee shops, dishes, etc.  That all changed when I bought my 35mm prime + A6000. And now, my friend Mike has been shooting some abandoned warehouses.  I need a new hobby.

So I started Eric Kim’s open source 10 week workshop: "All the World's Stage: Introduction to Street Photography".  One of the requirements is that students build and maintain a blog.  So apologies for boring all of you the next 10 weeks.

Of all the articles I’ve read in the first week syllabus, “Street Photography Pie" by Nick Turpin is the most interesting.  But his other article, "Undefining Street Photography”, captures the essence of what I want to explore.  That is, candid photos are the very essence of photography and everything else is a extension and specific genre. 

"Now I understand that ‘Street Photography’ is just ‘Photography’ in its simplest form, it is the medium itself, it is actually all the other forms of photography that need defining, landscape, fashion, portrait, reportage, art, advertising….these are all complicating additions to the medium of Photography, they are the areas that need to be defined, ring fenced and partitioned out of the medium of ‘Street Photography’.

When a child picks up a camera and pushes the button that simple spontaneous image is a Street Photograph, it is, first of all, a raw reaction to the scene in front of it, a person, a car, a color. That primitive urge to react, to make a picture is at the heart of Street Photography beyond any other area of picture making, it comes before any other agenda."

I can certainly say I’ve now noticed ads are also staged/meant to look candid.  But the candid nature of street photography is both intimidating and exciting at the same time.  I’ll start on the small street of my hometown (Princeton, NJ) but I look forward to continuing this wherever I travel.  

For prosperities sake, you can see my previous uneducated attempts via my Instagram Feed.  

It’s go time.