Leeds Street Photography

OK for my work I needed some of my own material to work from (was getting sick of using other peoples), as photography was the sort of back bone of the work I wanted to do an interesting, hard and topical style, street photography. Essentially documenting what goes on in the "street" (not as a subject).

I want small moments of untold stories to be the framework of my work before I effect the image with my concept aesthetics. It's these small everyday happenings which our brains choose to forget due to our minds thinking about something which to the individual is more important. After only maybe 15 seconds things are removed from the short term (working memory) to allow room for new memories.

I shot 2 rolls in the streets of Leeds around the route which I was going to use as a basis for a video piece but the work has changed now due to time constrains. Although I feel the idea of creating stills is so much better.

I shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 and the other roll was on HP5+ 400. I used my FM2 Nikon camera and a 50mm lens which was at f1.8 when it was wide open, so it was good for the street as sometimes lighting can become quite dark, eg in the train station i had to shoot at 1/30th wide open which was hard with the SLR mirror shaking my hand as i fired. I managed to develope the rolls in Kodak T Max and have them all scanned with the CoolScan V by the early hours of Monday morning.

Now that I have a few of my own images around the subject matter I wanted, I am now able to progress with experimenting further with the aesthetics of the images.

My tutor Tom said that when someone is able to look at the still images and understand that it is a memory, thats when I have it nailed on the head so to speak, but at the moment this seams a mammoth task. How the hell do you make something look like a memory without doing the cliché, vignette the hell out of it and add a sepia tone? We get stuck with this impression a from an early age, that when we visualize a memory we are looking at a old sepia photograph or a image which has bend marks, fading and tares. Maybe this is something which I might have to consider when producing my work.

Anyway here are a few of the image I will be considering to use as a final piece or at the very least my experiments will be on these images.