Exploring Street Photography: A Personal Journey / Part 1

Let’s talk about Street photography. Since, I’ve been retired for a couple years now I have been learning a lot about different practices of photography.

I have found through out my life I have many interest. By looking through my work over the years I’m mostly interested in and best at editorial photography. I’ve done newspaper, marketing, corporate portraits, environmental portraits, large format black and white landscape, still life, things left behind landscape and urban interpretations of Implied Humanity.

The one thing I haven’t done but I’m extremely interested in is Street Photography. In photojournalism or newspaper work it’s called a found feature or wild art. The limitation of wild art is that it is a stand alone photograph. It usually does not reveal much beyond its single uniqueness. I have never done street photography in the way of it’s definition. I seriously, want to work on this. My first challenge is location. during the summer the temperature in Phoenix is inhumane. Know one is outside in downtown Phoenix other than the seriously mentally ill and the homeless. I checked out downtown about a month ago and decided not to get out of my car. I seriously did not feel safe.

This early October of 2024 I was fortunate to go to my sister in laws house in Santa Monica, California. She lives very close to the strand which in East Coast terms is the board walk. I had close access to the Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach. This was my opportunity to give street photography an honest try. I had so much fun. It was the happiest I have been in a very long time photographing. I was totally engaged, eyes wide open seeing observing what was in front of me. I absolutely loved it! I went to the pier twice and one afternoon to Venice Beach. I shot hundreds of photographs and edited it down to about 50. I brought the images into Final Cut Pro X and created a slide show with music. I created a title page and a scrolling ending credits page. It’s 5:40 seconds long. My challenge now is, I can’t show it on Social media because I’m using copy righted music. I have to find music from creative commons which is license free music. I’m definitely having trouble finding something I like. If and when I do find the appropriate music I will post it. For now I’ll show a few out-takes from the project.