I find that the best way to really shake the rust off when you haven’t shot street in a while is to go to these massive public events where everyone has a camera out and just shoot with little possibility of confrontation. I mean, really if someone were to be that pissed that you’re taking their picture at something like a pillow fight, then they’ve obviously need to use their pillow to catch up on their sleep.
Usually when the lighting is as drab as it was today, I just opt to stay home but in these cases, the flat lighting takes one photographic variable out of the equation and gets you to focus on composition and getting your timing down - both of which I felt was still in Winter hibernation mode. (seemingly all the snow indicated that Spring was still in hibernation mode too)
This was also an excuse to stretch my in story-telling and editing muscles as those I feel need a good workout as well. I mean, I hardly look at images the minute I get home from a shoot so it was weird adhering to a false sense of time sensitivity as I gave myself a deadline to work with. I just wanted to see if I could still curate images quickly and narrow down a story to only a few selects.
Given the nature of social media and how I’m terrible at posting on the fly, I knew I’d never keep up with those who tweet and actually ‘insta’gram. Probably another reason why I think I wouldn’t be a good photojournalist.
In any case, trying to narrow things down to 10 images or less was a struggle. Even when narrowing things down in Lightroom with first flagging selects, then colour coding, then again with star ratings, I still ended up with about 17 images. Fail. Might as well share the link to the rest of the 50+ images for the While I’m at it. Click here to view the rest of them on facebook.
Good thing this event is pretty self explanatory because I’d feel pretty bad if you still didn’t get the concept of a pillow fight just by looking at the images. Clearly it’s simply legal assault ;)
Hey, if any of you guys have some solid techniques when it comes down to narrowing down selects for photo essays, feel free to let me know, otherwise enjoy the snaps!