Before the fall semester ended I took two of my mentees downtown to work on our street photography, as well as demonstrate using the 4×5 view camera outside of a studio setting. While the film images I shot that day didn’t turn out super great, the digital shots are some of my new favorites!
I had recently read online from another photographer that shooting with your camera set to black and white can really help to focus on light and how it is falling on your subject, and thought that would be a very interesting tool to try out downtown. I did this on my Canon Rebel T6 by going through my settings and selecting ‘picture style’ on the second page of the menu, then changing it to monochrome. I later found out that this doesn’t limit the file to only black and white, and when you load your images into lightroom, you can still access the color version of the photo!
While portraits are my main subject when shooting, I do enjoy street photography that excludes people and had a lot of fun focusing on the details and angles of downtown scranton. For some images I liked the ‘straight on’ look, really focusing on preexisting symmetry and trying to highlight and exaggerate it.
In other shots I focused on creating geometric shapes with negative space, and playing around with the geometric shapes in the subjects themselves. Negative space in a photo can be just as important as positive space, creating balance, depth, and a sense of space. Using interesting angles, including looking up from a lower angle, highlighted theses features and showed perspectives one wouldn’t typically have when walking around Downtown Scranton. When editing I tried to stay pretty true to tone of the original shots, and only brought out more slight changes in emphasis.
I’m hoping to get out and do more out of class work this semester with friends and fellow shutterbugs, as it really helps me break through creative slumps. I enjoy working alongside other photographers or even just walking around with friends, as it helps point out interesting and new subjects and can be a good form of stress relief.