Delving into Street Photography

So for my first semester back at university, we were given the freedom to experiment with multiple different genres of photography. One lane that I have always been interested in but had never really attempted was street photography. I wanted to steer away from my very colourful, editorial work for a bit and try something a little bit different.

I tried including some portrait work with this using both digital and film and was quite impressed with the results considering being a newbie.

This was one of the photographs taken of my boyfriend, Regan. He joined me on most of my many walks around town, therefore becoming the number 1 model for my project. I decided to edit these images with a very high contrast black and white as this was the chosen aesthetic (inspired by Rupert Vandervell).

All night time images were taken with flash to emphasise the high contrast theme I was leaning towards.

These are just a couple more photographs taken on a walk around my town, both becoming crowd favourites within my class! Again, I was very much leaning towards the high contrast black and white aesthetic with these photographs, as emphasised in the brickwork in the second image (also known as 'the couch photo' amongst my university group).

After a session with our guest speaker at university, Francesca Genovese, I was advised to look into a creator named Anna Fox who had created a series based around a holiday park. This spiked my interest after working on a park for 5 years and I immediately started my research. After being granted permission from one of my previous managers there, I headed to the park for a shoot.

Being an ex member of staff meant that I was allowed in the maintenance yard to capture the 'behind the scenes' of the park. This was one of my favourite photographs from this day as it captures the innocent aspects of families on holiday as well as the chaos that the staff experience everyday. I stuck to my high contrast theme when editing this photograph as I feel as though this image has some darker undertones to it.

After presenting contact sheets to my tutor, he selected a variety of photographs that he thought had potential, images I hadn't originally looked twice at as I didn't think they could have matched the theme I had been working on. However, after looking at the photographs from a different perspective, I realised that this image, along with a few others, had potential to be high contrast colour street photographs. This quickly became one of my favourite images and includes minimal editing. The 'film setting' aesthetic matches the street photography genre that I was going for and bring me slightly closer to my comfort zone of vibrant, dramatic photographic style.

Holiday parks feel very homely to me as I have spent a lot of my life surrounded by them. This image is quite the opposite, being slightly more frightening than how holiday parks are typically perceived.

I'm going to keep this post short and sweet while I'm getting used to blogging on here. I hope this style of post is interesting to you as I have lots of ideas for future posts :)