52:2013 Week 11

The theme this week was Street Photography. Street Photography is not a genre that I have done a lot of with the following shot from New York featuring in my Project 365 two years ago one of only a few...

Whilst I have always admired this style I also hadn't thought much about until a couple of weeks ago when I attended the Wellington Meetup Group Portrait session where it came up in discussion and there were very strong views against doing it by a significant portion of the group. It was therefore no surprise with the comments in the 52 Weeks group  theme discussion indicating it was not something that many members of the group were looking forward too.

With that in mind I ventured out this morning to visit the local market that sets up in the local shopping centre car park each week. I found I had arrived a little late as many of the stalls were already packing up. I did feel self conscious and out of my comfort zone and only took three shots before heading home feeling good with the featured shot.

The shot I took was of a section that was still active and I was drawn to the three people at the bottom right of the shot. One of the lessons I had in mind was the photo should tell a story and I felt those people did so. Here is the original shot:

Processing was initially in Lightroom as I cropped very slightly to get rid of a bright area on the left of the image and adjusted contrast and dodged and burnt the image to lighten the three people and darken the rest of the image to make them stand out more. I wasn't happy with the black and white conversion in Lightroom so took the image into Silver Effects Pro which better rendered the image how I envisioned it.

I am not sure I will do a lot of street photography going forward but I do keep threatening to do a strangers project at some point to get me more comfortable with photographing strangers. If you came to the blog directly you can see the larger version of the photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwallace/8559974819/