It’s been a long time since I last posted here, but it’s not that I abandoned my passion: I’ve practiced it happily over the summer. But since the end of summer it’s been hard for me to create anything, even processing and posting images. I had a bit of a dip in general, which kills creativity. Now the fogs in my head are disappearing and I’m picking things up from where I left them, trying to reach out and connect: Here we go! I broke the following post down in three sections titled Street, Jazz and use of lens to talk about the different aspects of this street event that I photographed in The Hague, The Netherlands. I hope you find something interesting in there.
Street
I’m getting more and more into street photography as a great addition to my Landscape and Travel stuff. I predominantly practice it in my home town. Mostly I go to the beach side because of the great light and backgrounds. This time I went into the city itself on a nice, late summer evening. My approach for street is predominantly B&W with the lightest possible camera and lens. See more about my lens choice below.
It normally takes a while for me to get into the ‘zone’ of photography, when I walk around. Often I play music on my ear phones and purely focus on what is happening around me in a visual sense. This time I went out with my wife so it was a bit different, but I still took time to linger and wander, sometimes losing my wife and finding her again. She didn't mind much because it was such a great atmosphere.
Jazz
Passing the the food stands/trucks and the tarrasses of restaurants and bars, we found a great spot at the quayside of the canal to sit where the boats carrying the Jazz bands would dock to play their music.
It got a bit darker, people moved on from their meals and gathered around to listen to the music. There were bars around to add a drink to the listening if one desires, and plenty did. The organisation was incredible. Apart from everything that happened on the street (bars, retaurants, food trucks) there was a time schedule for boats with amazing musicians to dock at places around the neighborhood. The boat driver would dock; the scheduler would keep the time; and the sound engineer would jump onshore to connect the cable to a sound system in the street, tune it and there we go! The only thing that we didn’t like were all the plastic trow-away glasses everywhere! SUch a waste and pollution (Plastic Soup); anno 2019 this should be ‘not-done’. I hope to see the organisers or municipal for next year to use paper cups or even better: return-fee glasses.
But the music was sooo good! We were literally sitting in between the musicians with the boat right in front of us. I could hear the keyboard and bass over the speakers, but the singer, trumpet and percussion were heard direcly from in front of us. What struck me was how much the mucisians communicate with each other, mostly with eye contact and body language, they indicate if they want to go on on this threat or want another instrument or tune to come in, and how. Really amazing and we enjoyed it a lot.
One Lens to rule them all
I am on a journey to improve my creative voice, my style in photography; aren’t we all? I’ve learnt one thing: it’s not something you can buy and it is different for everybody. So listening to brand marketing and all the review sites and vloggers that are concerned with this is of little value; it can even be very distracting. I takes me time to find bloggers that write about style, color grading, composition etc. but I found them.
The other thing I learned is Creative Constraint. Less (gear) is more (creativity). Less gear to carry, to fiddle with, to swap lenses, options to consider, decisions to make. On one hand liberating because of these reasons, but it is also a constraint when you cannot zoom in and out to see if there is any interesting composition. Since this last year I like to go with one fixed focal-length lens, maybe two, and force myself to pre-visualise in that angle of view. What I am finding is that It helps me to previsualise much better. And it helps me to develop a consistent style across a series of photos.
So I took this shoot with a standard 50mm equivalent lens, which I love (35mm f/2 for my Fuji X-system). The more I shoot with it, the more I see 50mm scenes around me. I don’t see the 135mm or the 24mm scene. And I an learning that I can just put it up and shoot right away, I’m even learning to shoot blind with it. Some of the shots below were done like that.
For street and candid I really love this method. Mostly I use this lens (35mm f/2), but I also use the 23 f/2 or 16 f/1.4. I plan to endeavor on more of these creative challenges, perhaps going on a trip with only one prime... Zooms still dominate my landscape genre… horses for causes.
