My First Attempt at Street Photography
Gary Detonnancourt
I’ve shot many types of photography over the last twenty or so years and if you look through my website you’ll see that I mostly shoot wildlife, portraits, and some landscapes. Recently I guess I’ve been a little burned out because I haven’t been shooting much at all, of course, that could also be because my life has been quite hectic lately. Things have begun to settle down a bit and I’ve been getting the bug to get out and shoot again.
The recent Youtube videos I’ve been watching have been about vintage lenses and street photography, both of which are totally new to me. I thought these two things would probably go great together and I should give them a go.
I recently purchased the Canon FD 24 mm F/2.8 and the 50 mm F/1.4 and the Fotasy FD to Fuji X adapter to put them on my Fujifilm XT-3. I also purchased a Canon FD to RF adapter so I could use the lenses on my R5.
I just love the look and feel of these lenses, even though they are from the 80s they feel high quality, and the manual focus experience is buttery smooth. Plus focus peaking on the XT-3 makes manually focusing very easy.
My plan was to visit a local city and to look for interesting locations with good light and hope to capture people moving through these scenes. What I learned was it’s not as easy as it sounds. Finding interesting places in good light with people is quite challenging and fun. I wanted high-contrast black-and-white images but I also didn’t want to lock myself into just one type of photo so I shot raw files and processed them in Lightroom CC on my Ipad.
I’m also new to the whole iPad editing workflow. I like it because you can work directly on the image with the Apple pencil and it’s fun to be able to edit anywhere I want and not have to be tied to a desktop computer. I found that I can do most of what I can do with Lightroom Classic and it’s pretty fast and easy. I also really like that the images as synced to all of my devices through the cloud.
If you like the look of the processing in this image, here is the link to purchase this Lightroom Preset, so you can try it out on your images.
I hope you enjoyed my first attempt at street photography, I certainly did. This surprised me quite a bit because I’m not big on cities. However, I found the photographic techniques of hunting and gathering to be fun and very challenging.