Rodney Campbell's Blog

I’ve decided to take up the 52/2011 challenge for this year. The idea of which is to undertake a year long challenge and post at least a photo a week on a particular topic or theme.

For my challenge I’d already been thinking back in January about getting out of my comfort zone and practicing a style of photography known as “Street Photography”. Some of you are probably already aware I’ve essentially been trying this since the start of the year however I’m going to more formalise it through the 52/2011 and keep the flow (and hopefully growth) in one thread.

I work in Sydney’s CBD so this location should hopefully provide a wealth of early morning, lunchtime and late afternoon subject matter for those times I can get out to try my hand.

One possible misconception is that street photography is the photographing of empty streets – perhaps a better term for this class of photography would be social, ‘in the moment’ or ‘real life reportage’ photography – it’s photographing people in their natural environments.

Street photography seems to have had a bit of a resurgence lately and apparently 🙂 it can be quite exciting – you can go around in public and take pictures of (gasp) strangers!

For me I see a few main areas of potential growth for myself including:
– the obvious things like ability to compose and shoot quickly, to look and notice more about whats going on around me, to see and anticipate ‘moments’, train the eye, camera handling and familiarity – all useful skills for most other photographic disciplines
– post processing skills – as I’ll be processing most images to monochrome there are many and varied techniques and “looks” for doing this
– overcoming shyness, building the self confidence to eventually walk up to strangers and (ask!! to) take their photo
– patience 🙂

I hope by the end of the year to be comfortable in both main approaches to street photography: Candid – capturing the moment spontaneously, without asking subjects to pose for you and without them being aware of you doing so and Conversational – where you engage the subject beforehand, striking up a conversation, getting to know them and their personality and asking their permission before taking any photos.

My aim is to post at least a couple images a week for your viewing pleasure/comment/criticism or even unrestrained laughter 🙂

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