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Post date: Nov 03, 2019 5:44:47 PM
From NY with Fujilove
This week, I shared on Instagram & 500px, six pictures I took during the Fujilove Street photography workshop weekend. It was an excellent workshop — meticulous organization by Tomash Trzebiatowski, insightful teaching by Jens Krauer. I had met both of them during the initial Fujilove Conference in NY. Tomash deserves a lot of acclaim for all he does for Fujifilm and photography communities around the globe. Jens’s growth as a photographer has been impressive. Evidently he has been reflecting on photography in general, street photography in particular during this growth. His teaching relayed precious lessons distilled through these deep reflections.
The sign of a good teacher, in my mind, is that he (or she) doesn’t pull the students necessarily into his (her) own way, but helps the students discover their own ways. Indeed, During the workshop, Jens established a clear street photography baseline for all of us against which each of us could clarify our own standings. Jens Krauer’s provocative teaching style was very much instrumental in achieving that -- a style that provokes motivation and creativity.
Photography workshops, photo-walks are valuable experiences to learn and to meet like-minded, different-minded fellow photographers. Fujilove's workshop was a good example of that. But as Jens was pointing out during the workshop, actual street photography or any kind of serious photography happens in solitude. It might be that it was not a coincidence, from the pictures I took during the workshop weekend, the ones I consider to be better ones were taking on my way to the workshop or after our meetings walking back to my hotel, not when we were working around the same locations somewhat aware of each other. At least In my case, creativity requires somehow being or feeling alone.
I don’t know whether the pictures I take can be considered to be “street photography.” I don’t know the answer to that, but what I know is that the compliance to a genre is not that important (unless one is entering to a competition with specific restrictions), what is important is to create good photographs — whether they comply with a definition of a certain genre or not is not that significant.
Here are some highlights of my photography baseline:
I prefer to shoot in color, not only because Fujifilm’s colors are exceptionally good, but as they say, life happens in color and using color is one good way of depicting it. Since I use Fujifilm’s x100T, a camera with a fixed lens, I don’t shy away from cropping sometimes very closely. In any case, I aspire to frame my pictures in post-processing in 1:1 and 16:9 aspect ratios whenever I can. Since I don’t consider what I do to be photojournalism, I dare to remove distracting objects with cloning tool or local filters. But I do it as a last resort, ideally, I make all the efforts to get the photograph right in the camera. This is one of the reasons why although I set my camera to the RAW+JPEG option, I prefer to utilize the JPEG file generated within the camera.
Another point to notice: Not only I avoid taking pictures of people in distress or in appalling conditions, but I have a strong preference for seeking photographs of happy moments, if not happy, at least regular acts of living in the middle of all craze that takes place around the world. At this stage of my life, this is what I like to do, this is what I try to do: To remind myself and others, despite all these terrible things, life goes on and must go one.
As the teacher of all teachers must have said, “the point is to know oneself.” This is a good photography teacher does: to help us to know ourselves as photographers."
You can these pictures on the following WEB sites:
FLICKR ALBUM: https://www.flickr.com/gp/aonart/E8jjT6
GOOGLE PHOTOS: https://photos.app.goo.gl/D1GBxhCjYfJ3WqJa6
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