I have been giving some thought to different themes that I could use for my photography. Because I have always lived in cities, I decided that focusing, no pun intended, my photographic efforts on street scenes would be most appropriate. In the world of photography, this is typically called Street Photography.
I spent some time on the web looking at different examples of street photography. Some of the blogs that I have been reviewing also featured street photography by excellent photographers. This started to give me some good background on what street photography looks like and some of the perspectives and other techniques that photographers use to capture this art form.
Recently, my wife and I visited Baltimore Maryland and as we were driving through parts of the city I started to spot fantastic art painted on the sides of buildings. This was not graffiti, it was creative art by street artists capturing the spirit and ethos of urban life as it exists today. This gave me an inspiration to use these examples of street art in my photographic hobby! Most of the artwork that I had the opportunity to photograph was in the following neighborhoods: E. North Avenue, Latrobe Street, and the Coldstream Homestead Montbello community.
In all, I captured 30 different works of art during my journey in Baltimore. As I was looking through the images I had a hard time selecting the ones I want to post in this blog. After a lot of thought, I settled on 10 images that seem to capture the essence of the street art in this community. I hope you enjoy the mélange of photographs that I selected.
One of the areas that is still proving challenging is setting the correct exposure when there’s a bright background such as you find at midday. Several of these photographs clearly show that the highlights of the sky have been blown. Hopefully, as I gain more experience in using my camera I can avoid or at least minimize these blown highlights. One of the key things that I probably need to start doing is taking advantage of shooting during the golden hours of the day. All of the photography books I have read indicate that these are the best times to take photographs. The golden hour lasts for approximately one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset. Since this blog is intended to document my photographic exploits and development, I hope that these pictures display some improvement in my technique.
I’m looking forward to walking the streets of Washington DC in search of street art. This will be convenient for me since I live in northern Virginia near our nation’s capitol. Please come back to visit the C’est la vie blog to view those pictures near future.
C'est la vie 