2Why Street Photography Will Make You a Better Wedding Photographer
Don’t have any time for roaming streets with your camera? Well, put it aside for your personal development, because it can make you a better wedding photographer!
Whether your busy wedding season is kicking off or you’re slowly readjusting to have a quiet period, setting time aside for some personal street photography is certainly something that could help you take your photography and business to the next level. Constantly shooting weddings every weekend can make you image blind, so why not find a great reason to break away from your business just for a couple of hours every other week and give yourself room to grow?
You Will Enhance Your People Skills
First of all, let me say that if you can’t cope being in a social setting, weddings can be a hard and lonely place for the photographer, though they might appear glamorous and exciting from the outside. If you need to work on honing your people skills, streets are the places to be. If you’re going into your quiet season now, use this as an opportunity to work on your development. If this is your busy season, use it as an excuse to escape and enjoy photography from a personal standpoint, not that of a customer.
Street photography. It’s one of the most versatile and interesting genres of the medium. It’s also an elusive one, based on capturing real life situations filled with fleeting moments, light, expressions and interactions. And today, with a resurgence of lightweight mirrorless cameras and smartphone photography, more people are getting into it than ever before. Yet, despite its widespread adoption and high level of discipline and creativity needed to accomplish it, it is a genre largely ignored by the fine art world.
The 27th Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain. The ‘Castellers’ who build the human towers with precise techniques compete in groups, know as ‘colles’, at local festivals with the aim of building the highest and most complex human tower. The Catalan tradition is believed to have originated from human towers built at the end of the 18th century by dance groups and is part of the Catalan culture.
5As millennials take up film photography, darkrooms see a bright future again
At Toronto’s Downtown Camera, on any given day, there’s a lineup of young adults and teens clutching decades-old cameras and disposable point-and-shoots. Rather than take photos on smartphones or internet-connected cameras, these photographers are choosing to shoot on traditional film cameras and have their film developed at the store’s lab. For Downtown Camera, which opened in the 1970s and operates in Toronto’s financial district, the interest is so strong that the business will soon be moving to a new location to accommodate a bigger darkroom.
It’s part of a bigger resurgence of interest in film photography that is boosting business for specialty camera stores across Canada. The trend is driven predominantly by young people who have picked up interest shooting photos on film because of the different shooting experience and a look that is distinct from digital. It’s an analog comeback similar to that of vinyl records, which have been touted for the listening experience and rich sound and led to a whole new market for turntables and records.
6Reclaiming an old medium to tell new stories of Native Americans
The portraits’ revealing details—a baseball cap, tank top, wristwatch, down vest—contradict their old and withered appearance. What at first seem to be historic photographs are actually contemporary tintypes, images from respective projects about Native Americans from artists Will Wilson and Kali Spitzer.
Although their work employs an archaic medium, Wilson and Spitzer’s photographs have much to say about present-day Native American life. Wilson, a citizen of the Navajo Nation who is also of Welsh and Irish decent, sees his project as a collaboration with indigenous artists, arts professionals, and tribal leaders who, through their sessions, actively engage and dialogue with him. His evocative photographs counter longstanding stereotypes and distortions, contributing to “a re-imagined vision of who we are as Native people,” says Wilson.
