London Street Photographs – building a style

Some more London street shots – now working on closer shots with wider lenses

There are of course vastly more than enough street photographs of London, so there ought to be some rationale for my taking and publishing even more.  The usual justification is that they are taken from one’s own unique point of view.  But what is that exactly?  A bunch of random snaps of whatever presents itself in front of the camera might be interesting, but probably won’t be, particularly if there is no consistent approach, style, or composition in the shots.  I’ve been puzzling over this, and working towards defining my own style and viewpoint (s).  That of course involves trying out a few approaches and then working out which combination can express ideas best for me.  I hope you will bear with me as I hunt around a bit and show results along the way.

On a general level, I am settling in to black and white shots, with a particular cyan processing look, as you might be able to see over the last few posts.  B&W is often the simple way to make a boring colour photo more interesting, and over time I want to weed out the shots that are most guilty of that.  I’m also experimenting with shorter/wider focal lengths, and trying to both get closer while not being voyeuristic in the process.  In general I am going to avoid purely candid shots altogether – so that either people are visibly in the shot for only dramatic or compositional affect, as in the thumbnail shot above, or they are in outline or otherwise not particularly identifiable.  There is a huge exception to this coming up in a couple of posts time – but there is a specific reason for the deviation.

Anyway – enough of this, here are the shots which were taken with 16mm and 30mm primes on the NEX-6, in August,.  As usual information on how to work the controls is at the end of the post.

To View: If you have Flash the photos are best seen in full screen (press FS in the bottom right hand corner), and in slide show ( press SL).   If you don’t have Flash, i.e if you are using an Apple iPad/Pod/Phone, or a Nexus 7/10 tablet, or any Android tablet running 4.1 +, you can now see them as well.  Just click any of the thumbnails and a full screen slide-show should start. Information on each photo can be seen by clicking on the ‘i’ symbol in the upper right corner of the screen show.