Recently I’ve been really fascinated by street photography and following the work of many street photographers on Instagram and Facebook. Great street photography is a combination of incredible technical and creative skill, patience — and quite a bit of luck, being in the right place at the right time. It also requires quite another level of confidence, being in the street, photographing strangers just doing their thing, going about their everyday business.
I’ve done a bit of street photography when I was in New York last year, just using my smartphone which has an advantage of being discreet and unassuming. Still, my photographs mainly involved architecture, shadows and people’s limbs, never actual portraits. Because — it’s scary to just blatantly take photos of people!
So this year I’ve been trying to challenge myself with purposefully heading out to photograph in the streets, with my big camera (although I do feel like a smaller mirrorless camera would be better for more candid photography which I prefer; when people realise you’re taking a photo of them they start acting differently), and there’s no better place to start building up your confidence than protests and parades, as not only lots of things happen there at the same time, but also people expect to be photographed.
Last month I photographed an anti-Brexit march in London (which I’ll blog soon), and last weekend I’ve headed to Central London to take some photographs of London Pride parade 2018. That day was probably one of the hottest I remember, with temperatures rising up to 30C, which added quite another level of complication to shooting, but it was fun nevertheless!
I chose to focus on the happy, celebratory part of the event, ignoring some of the not-so-pretty stuff happening on the streets around me (like mountains of rubbish and excessive public drunkenness which I was frankly rather upset with). Such is the power of photography that you can choose what you want to show!
Anyway, I leave you with some snaps from the day, hope you enjoy looking — let me know what you think in the comments!
